Faith is subjective truth I, 2026

Oil on canvas

Philospher’s Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of the leap of faith runs through this series – the idea that some choices can only be made by accepting uncertainty, not by rational proof. This is the first painting built on that premise. Its central figure is modeled on Saint Sebastian: pierced by arrows, exposed, standing on nothing but his own resolve. Oskars Mūrnieks doesn’t use the figure in religious manner; the arrows stand for the shots life and fate takes at a person, the kind that can’t be reasoned away, and the wound becomes a stand-in for what it means to exist under that exposure. The body throughout is treated less as physical body and more as a psychological, symbolic form – a way of carrying emotional tension rather than illustrating it. The transformation through suffering at the heart of the image owes something to Odilon Redon, who turned religious motifs into private, subjective visions, and to Nietzsche’s idea that one must burn in one’s own fire before becoming something new. The composition itself was built the same way – intuitively, without a fixed plan, letting the image find its form as it was painted.