Peklo (Пекло) / Inferno
Figures press together across the full width of the sheet, so close that the composition offers no ground to stand on and no edge to escape toward. Heads tilt back; arms cross and clasp; a pair of hands grips a knee in the lower right with a precision the rest of the drawing withholds. These clasped hands and bare feet are the most sharply observed passages in the work, and they carry its emotional weight — the small, involuntary gestures of people bracing.
The palette divides the picture between flesh and fire. Cool greys, pale ochres, and slate greens describe the bodies in flat, faceted planes; behind and between them, blocks of orange and yellow flicker in short broken strokes, arranged in a rough grid. The grid is the building — window after window in a highrise, each one lit — and it is also the fire. The work refuses to distinguish the two. Red slices through in broad diagonal wedges, and passages of near-black brown fall across the upper corners like collapsing structure.
The watercolor beneath gives the surface its stained, seeping depth; the pastel worked over it is drier, more urgent, applied in scratched strokes that never fully settle. The two layers pull against each other the way the image does — the slow spread of the ground against the panicked mark on top.
The title names hell directly. What the drawing renders is not the weapon or the impact but the interior of the event: a group of people inside a tower, faces turned up and away, held in the light of their own building burning