White mask 2021

Sergey Piskunov painted this arresting portrait, "White Mask," using oils to conjure an image that's both familiar and deeply strange. The color palette is deliberately restrained, focusing on muted skin tones and the stark white of the mask, which, ironically, isn't smooth or pure, but cracked and fissured like parched earth. Look at the upper-left cheek area. Here, the mask fragments into a network of tiny islands, each a testament to the material's fragility. Piskunov uses the physicality of the paint itself to emphasize the contrast between the perfect smoothness we expect from beauty products and the reality of imperfection and decay. The process becomes the point. It reminds me a bit of Jenny Saville’s unflinching portraits, but with a touch more…dare I say…glamour? It's a fascinating conversation between beauty and disintegration, the real and the artificial, leaving us to ponder the masks we wear, both literally and figuratively. It embraces ambiguity.