2013
Egg tempera on wood
70 x 90 cm
This painting explores the boundaries of pictorial language through the prism of monumental art. The figure of a kneeling warrior, his head bowed in silent respect, is a direct quotation, referencing the image of a fallen horseman from Piero's fresco The Battle of Eraclio and Cosroe. However, Smirnoff radically strips this silhouette of the chaos of battle, armor, and historical context. The warrior's fall in a battle is transformed into a voluntary, sacred stand, and a powerful color chord of deep ultramarine and magenta lifts the composition from a material register to a purely spiritual one, evoking the traditional vestments of saints. This gesture clearly evokes the artist's image: the pose of physical effort and humility echoes the laborious methodology of the egg tempera technique that demands bending down over the panel, as the paint is applied horizontally in wide gestures or dense blobs. The genuflection here becomes an acknowledgment of the impossibility of articulating the mystical mystery of existence. The effect is enhanced by the deliberate use of non-finito (intentional incompleteness), which conceptually links the painting to Piero della Francesca's late period and his failing vision. The translucent background, through which the texture of the gesso shines through, and the blurred contours of the cloak leave space for the sheer ambiguity of meaning, capturing the form in the moment of its continuous formation.