Boy Soldiers Painting

The story of the paintings unfolds around the theme of children’s play. The figures are in a semi-abstract environment, as if cut out and collaged on a flat unicolored space. The characters don’t have faces, they are undefined. Their images are fuzzy, blurred and fragmented. Тhis lack of clarity aims to give us a feeling for a state of dream, memory, for a distant vision. Тhe children that we see in the paintings are set as if in usual, day-to-day situations, however, they look somehow lonely and anxious. On the one hand, in this project, I portray the idea of childhood through the point of view of the adult who had irrevocably forgotten their experience as a child. This bright and abundant period of life is only a fragmented memory, while the reality back then is forever veiled by the thousands of layers of the present. The images could be interpreted as an adult’s memory of themselves or as a projection of our fears and traumas onto our own children. On the other hand, the paintings could be looked at as an experience through a child’s inner world - misunderstood, controlled, over-patronized, placed in the boundaries and convictions of the adults on whom it depends. The result is a clash of worlds, which can never overlap with one another in this dynamic between a child and adult. Our fears and notion of what’s right drown this fictitious and boundless world where everything is possible and in which we had all once lived. Lost in our mundane worries, do we forget that we were also once children? Do we delude ourselves in our strive to show our children how to grow up, perceiving their world through our distant subjectiveness?