Mystic Realism

Mystic Realism, in contrast to the Theatric, begins from a different point: it consciously withdraws from social condensation and seeks those threshold spaces in which the visible flows into the transcendent. Reality is not understood here as an explicable system, but as a permeable membrane between immanence and metaphysical intuition, between faith, wishful thinking, and experience.

In this context I do not appear as a director, but as a seeker — or, in the pictorial-aesthetic sense of Romanticism, as a wanderer: as a mediator between landscape and human being, interiority and exteriority, devoted to spiritual enlightenment and the supernatural. This painting refuses linear narration, and time is de-chronologised and transferred into a state of extended presentness — slowed, suspended, frozen — in order to celebrate the moment of stillness, sweetened only by the sounds of the forest.

Landscapes appear as bucolic spaces of projection and places of longing — as loci desiderii — places of retreat and spiritual recollection. Even where they seem realistic, they are never purely mimetic: subtle rustling in the undergrowth, chirping in the treetops, the gently languid babbling of a brook — icons, animals, sources of light, fragments of letters, vodka bottles — open an invisible, transcendent level in which the image loses its referential bond to reality and becomes an independent, autonomous space of experience.

Realism functions here as a threshold and not as an end, for it anchors the gaze only in order to transcend it at once. Symbols are not always archetypal, universally coded in the sense of clear readability, but at times also neologistic and polysemous. The viewer is no longer an analyst, but a contemplator, a curious observer invited to lose themselves in the image and, in the slowing of seeing, to experience a form of insight. Understanding the whole presupposes the interpretation of the individual parts, whereby the addressed viewer increasingly moves within the hermeneutic circle.

In this context, the large format is not an expression of monumentality, but of immersion: the paintings are meant to be entered, traversed, experienced. Within them articulates a Romantic longing for meaning, for enlightenment, for an order beyond the rational. Mystic Realism is therefore not merely a form of escapism, but rather an attempt to restore to the visible that depth which it has lost in the noise of the world.