Every Time I End Up Dead It’s a Rainy Afternoon and I Have Nothing To Do

Schmincke oils on canvas, Anton Terziev, 2023
Size: 20 x 20 cm

Title credit: Svetoslav Todorov - writer, editor, correspondent
Collaborating since 2019

Part of No Time For Losers series of drawings, object, photography and paintings (2019-)

Courtesy the artist
Photo: © the artist

Anton Terziev’s **memento mori** painting offers a bold, contemporary interpretation of a long-established artistic theme: the inevitability of death. Throughout the history of Western art, memento mori works have served as a contemplative reminder of life’s transience, often featuring skulls, extinguished candles, or wilted flowers as symbols of mortality. In this painting, Terziev presents a single skull as the central focus, charged with vibrant hues and thick, impasto brushstrokes. By combining intense reds, oranges, and blues against a stark black background, he propels the viewer’s attention directly to the skull’s form, while creating an electrifying interplay of warm and cool tones.

The highly textural surface—characterized by its visible ridges of oil paint—gives the skull a raw, sculptural presence that bridges the gap between painting and relief. This painterly tactility resonates with expressionistic traditions, where gestural marks underscore the emotional and psychological weight of the subject. Such an approach also evokes parallels to post-Impressionist artists like Van Gogh, who famously used thick layers of paint to heighten emotional resonance. Yet Terziev’s palette is more extreme, his oranges and reds at once evoking the heat of life and the consuming flame of mortality, while the cooler blues suggest an otherworldly chill—perhaps referencing the passage from life into death.

A particularly striking detail is the **circular coin-like form** nestled within the skull’s eye socket. In classical mythology, coins placed over the eyes of the dead were offerings to Charon, the ferryman of Hades. By incorporating this motif, Terziev taps into a deep cultural memory surrounding the rituals of death, while also modernizing it through his contemporary aesthetic. In this way, the work speaks not only to the timelessness of human mortality but also to the ongoing conversation between past and present in art. Terziev’s painting thus stands as both a reverent nod to centuries of vanitas imagery and a distinctly modern commentary on how we confront—or avoid confronting—our own impermanence. The result is a dynamic, visually arresting canvas that reinvigorates the memento mori tradition for the twenty-first century.