The secret library

100×120 cm Mixmedia on Canvas

2025

In this painting, a young girl sits at the threshold of wonder, holding her book as if she has just discovered the secret language of the universe. Around her, stories come alive — pages float like memories through the air, and beside her stands the unicorn, silent and eternal, yet fragile like a dream at dawn.

The girl has only just begun to learn how to read, to understand, to name the world around her. It is the beginning of the endless human journey: we spend our entire lives learning, studying, searching for meaning, collecting knowledge, experiences, and wisdom. From childhood to old age, we try to understand ourselves, others, and the mysteries of life itself.

Yet there is something beautifully tragic in this pursuit. Just when many people become truly wise, life begins to fade. Time slips through our hands. Some even lose their memories before death arrives, as dementia slowly erases the stories, names, and lessons they once carried so carefully within them. All the knowledge gathered over a lifetime can disappear like dust carried by the wind.

The unicorn embodies this fleeting existence on planet Earth. Like the unicorn, life is rare, magical, and impossible to hold forever. It appears for only a brief moment before vanishing again into the unknown. The unicorn also symbolizes the dream state — the invisible world of imagination, memory, innocence, and the soul. It reminds us that not everything valuable can be measured by what we know or remember.

Perhaps the true meaning of life is not to reach complete understanding, because no human ever truly can. Perhaps it is simply the beauty of the search itself: the child opening her first book, the wonder in her eyes, the dreams that carry us forward even while time quietly moves on.

This painting speaks about the tenderness of human existence — about learning, forgetting, dreaming, and the fragile miracle of being alive at all.