Untitled (St. George the Victorious) 1915

Pavel Filonov made this small, untitled oil painting of St. George sometime in the first half of the 20th century. It’s bursting with this fractured, kaleidoscopic energy. Every inch of the surface is covered in tiny, precise strokes of color, like he’s building the image from the atom up, one painstaking mark at a time. There's something almost obsessive about the detail; the faces in the crowd are like individual cells, each with its own expression. Then you notice the textures, the way he builds up the paint to create a kind of shimmering, faceted surface. Look at the way he renders St. George's armor, the highlights catching on each tiny plane, making him seem both heroic and vulnerable. It's like he’s trying to capture the whole universe in a single image, an artwork with its own internal logic, where everything is connected. This reminds me of the work of some of the later Symbolists, like Gustav Moreau, where narrative gives way to this all-over field of marks. With Filonov, it’s not just about the story, but the act of seeing itself, how we construct meaning from chaos.