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THE RITUAL

2006
Painting by Valery Koroshilov
Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm. Artist's Collection, London

I believe the context of a painting only matters if it’s inspired by the poetic intuition, and therefore, it is addressed to the poetic perception.

The structure of this painting is influenced by my experiments with balancing the background and the foreground in an attempt to make up a whole pictorial space. The young lady in red, who is trying to follow the movements of the white egret, is in between the two: the background being more abstract, is the invisible self, and the foreground is the physical self. What you see is a ritual of play, and what is unseen is a sensation of purity, fragility, beauty, freedom, and flight.

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