The Antinomic Component of a Work of Art. Its Role in the Emergence of the Artistic Image. The Creative Experience of A. M. Smirnov

This study examines the antinomic component of a work of art as a structural basis for form-building in religious painting of the second half of the twentieth century. The object of this study is the creative legacy of Moscow artist and Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts Alexander Maksimovich Smirnov, whose individual visual language is characterized by a profound antinomic discourse at the level of ontological expression. The author examines in detail aspects of this topic, including the specific manifestation of binary oppositions in the compositional structure of religious works, the mechanisms of transforming iconographic tradition through the prism of conflictual thinking, and the dialectic of chiaroscuro and plastic solutions as a means of achieving the semantic integrity of the image. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the artist's cross cycle, triptychs, and polyptychs, in which antinomic tension serves as a defining factor of artistic expression, ensuring the unity of form and content through the structural juxtaposition of earthly and heavenly principles, suffering, and transformation. The research methods and methodology are based on a structural-semiotic analysis of visual material using iconographic methods and art historical hermeneutics, allowing us to identify the evolution of antinomic methods in the artist's idiom. The novelty of this study lies in the application of the concept of antinomy as a universal analytical tool for studying religious painting in the last third of the twentieth century. This opens up prospects for a profound understanding of the contradictory cultural processes in Russian art of this period and allows for a new examination of the mechanisms of artistic image formation amid the transformation of the era's visual language.