Dalila

Samson who fell asleep and trustingly lowered his head looking like Laocoon’s peaceful head into his beloved’s lap (“Delilah”, 2009). His massive body covered with coarse cloth stretches from the left to the right and takes all the foreground of the painting. It is painted with the shades of muted red and brown. Bright luminous reflexes that look like reflections of a fire outside of the picture’s composition area in front of the heroes are put on his glyphic face and his thick hair. Delilah, sitting on the right side, puts her small hand on her lover’s head, leans slightly aside and raises the scissors. There are far fewer cadmium flames on her figure and her face, she is painted more conditionally, more flat and graphic – she is like a shadow, an illusion that came from Samson’s dream. Behind Samson and Delilah spreads the lava of the landscape: first shoots up the canopy of fluorescent red reflecting of the figures of the lovers, behind it shows white-hot globe of the horizon with scarce trees and after that the umber semi-skies, semi-mountains. The foreground is so much approximated to us that there is an impression that we intrude into someone’s personal life, into the space of mystery.
Anastasia Tarasova, art critic