2025 Finalists

«Crepuscular Garden» is a landmark work for me, one I spent a long time making. During that period I was living in a village with my partner: every day we walked for hours through forests, fields, and overgrown gardens. My life felt stagnant – nothing was happening – and I had more time to read, think, and paint. The starting point was the books of Carl Gustav Jung: I immersed myself in his writings on the unconscious and dreams, began to practice active imagination, and kept a dream journal. I became interested in “looking to the other side” – to the place where images arise on their own and lead the way.

I was captivated by the inexplicable, elusive “magic” of images – not the cinematic kind, but something real and inward: dreams and archetypes, their universality and ubiquity. I deliberately wanted the painting to look “magical” and slightly psychedelic. It is a layering of motifs from dreams, active imagination, and saved photographs that troubled me and quite literally haunted me. I wanted to pour it out – wildly, chaotically – and then gather it into a single space where fluid forms, distorted perspective, and shifting light blur the boundaries between the real and the mythical, between the conscious and the subconscious.

The image of the crepuscular garden still moves me today. Everything that happens there, I propose to read not literally but symbolically. And if the meanings of the symbols sometimes contradict one another – that is how life is, when you waver between extremes and search for balance. A red thread running through the work is passion (not necessarily sexual). The nude, intertwined bodies are not a sign of lust but a symbol of acceptance and union into something new. In alchemical iconography such a union signifies purification and the mixing of elements. Psychic energy is wild by nature, which is why figures in animal masks appear: ancient impulses that still live within us and take part in our lives – in our garden.

The severed head of the dragon is an image of taming and bringing this force – libido – under control; at the same time it is a personal transformation – the Rider. A personal story from my past is encoded in the work, one I am not comfortable speaking about directly, which is why I chose the language of symbols. I also mark my fears: in the lower right corner the cemetery and the house foundation represent, for me, the fear of death and the fear of being left alone – of incompletion, the emptiness of an unfinished base.

Why painting? Because it is easier for me to express personal experiences through image, color, and the rhythm of the brushstroke; it matters to me that something lived stands behind the image. Words often fail. In *Crepuscular Garden* I showed passion, the memory of a bitter mistake, the work of self-transformation, and my fears – and I consider this work successful because I managed to achieve precisely the effect I see in my mind.

(15/25)