Still Life Flight

In "Still Life Flight", Victor creates a metarealistic painting combining elements from three different traditions in European oil painting; landscape, seascape, and still life. Here Victor paints a landscape which is at the same time a still life, and which also contains a seascape. The elements of the painting are all realistically portrayed, but are combined in unusual ways. "Still Life Flight" is a landscape painting in which the small figure of a man stands on a vast blue plain, which stretches off to the mountains in the far horizon, under a cloudy sky. At the same time, it is a still life painting of a bottle and an apple on a blue tablecloth, in a room. And also, it contains a painting of a ship sailing across the ocean. To create this effect, some elements of this painting simultaneously symbolize two different things, in two different symbol systems. Some elements simultaneously symbolize three different things, in three different symbol systems. For example, the pale blue and white area that is the top half of the painting represents the wall of the room in the still life painting. This same area of paint represents the cloudy sky in the landscape painting, and also, represents the ocean, in the seascape. The tablecloth on which the bottle rests is also a vast plain upon which we see the small figure of a man flying a kite. The man's kite is also a ship, sailing across an ocean. Thus, the basic forms from different symbol systems are being put together in a nonstandard way. The implication is that similarly, in life, the ordinary elements which we see around us could simultaneously co-exist in some other reality, in which they may have a completely different meaning. We are like the little white butterflies at the bottom of the painting, souls who see the blue area only as a piece of cloth on which they may rest, having no idea that this cloth could also be a vast plain stretching off to a far horizon.