The Sacred Series: Icons, Myths, and Personal Mythology

The Sacred & Mythological series is not a set of illustrations of religious themes. It is a sustained, years-long encounter with the structures of sacred imagery — their gravity, their silence, their capacity to hold meaning without releasing it into explanation.

I grew up in an environment saturated with Orthodox icons. Not as objects of devotion — at least not primarily — but as images. Their spatial logic, their refusal of perspective, their treatment of the human figure as a vessel for something beyond the human: all of this entered my visual vocabulary before I had words for it.

The Icon as Structure

What distinguishes the icon from ordinary painting is not its religious content but its formal discipline. Every element is positioned, weighted, governed by internal rules that are more architectural than narrative. The figure does not move through space; it inhabits it. The background is not a setting; it is a field of presence.

This structural principle — the image as a field of forces rather than a window into a scene — is the foundation of everything I do. Even when the subject matter is entirely personal, the underlying logic remains iconographic.

Montserrat, Samson, Saturn

Each work in the Sacred series begins with a figure I cannot fully explain. The Virgen de Montserrat appeared not as a commission or a conceptual decision, but as an image I could not avoid. The same is true of Samson's encounter with the lion, and of my version of Saturn.

These are not retellings. They are re-experiences. The Bible, the Greek myths, the Aztec codices — they provide starting points, but the painting itself moves into territory that no text has mapped.

Personal Mythology

The word "mythology" is important to me because it suggests a system — not a single story but a web of relations between figures, motifs, and forces. My sacred works are not isolated paintings. They form a constellation in which each image illuminates the others.

A viewer who sees the Virgen alongside Saturn alongside Samson begins to perceive not three separate subjects but a single inner world in which the sacred, the violent, and the tender coexist without resolution. This is the world I am building. The series is its architecture.