This work is a self-portrait in the image of a faun. The central theme of the painting is nostalgia in its various manifestations. On the one hand, genre painting on the subject of mythology is already an act of nostalgia for classical art; on the other hand, I express my own homesickness. I am from Kharkov, Ukraine, but the pandemic caught me in Milan, where I study, and I had to spend my lockdown myself at my small apartment in the south of the city. That's when I realised that we are all turning into made-up characters, losing live communication and creating our own online image. So my personal story is projected onto a faun, a cheerful mythical creature who suddenly feels sad. Under these conditions, he can only see his homeland through his smartphone screen. The landscape behind the faun refers to the main character's dreams of his native land. However, all the mythicity and romanticism of the story is interrupted by the red crocs that bring the story back to earth, adding to it a fraction of the absurdity inherent in the real life of a person who is isolated in a foreign country all alone.
