By its form, the artwork resembles a Medieval calendar, like the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry, containing all the months, as well as a celestial map and the Zodiac constellations on it.
2019 was the last conventionally normal year; the twenties (XX) brought a state of permanent instability, confusion, and danger. Even in its designation — XX — the twenties resemble something vague.
The main character here is the Black bride, crowned with the crown of celibacy (loneliness), frozen in the pose of a hanged man from the Tarot card, as an allegory of universal uncertainty (suspended state). She is the center of her own universe, her womb is the black sun, and the rest of the planets revolve around it. She points to the black emptiness within herself — an allegory of infertility, not physical, but moral.
Around the Black Bride is a circle with traditional symbolic creatures personifying the Zodiac constellations with brief descriptions of their properties: governing element, coldness or hotness, dryness or humidity.
The zodiac signs are also divided into three crosses according to the alchemical principle:
- body, fixed, permanent, salt;
- spirit, mutable, changeable, mercury;
- soul, cardinal, proactive, sulfur;
The alcoholic harlequin Aquarius, the gaunt Taurus, the Siamese alchemical androgynous Gemini, the cowardly Lioness, the witch Virgo, Sagittarius who shot himself in the head — each sign here has its own segment of the year.
The zodiac circle is divided into four parts — these are the seasons — a reference to the well-known “three wise monkeys”, but in an expanded variation. Here the alter ego of the author, a pink creature with long bat’s ears, who wanders from work to work, shares with the audience its annual experiences:
- I don’t feel anything because of the pain;
- I don’t see anything because of tears;
- I don’t say anything out of fear;
- I don’t hear anything because of the noise;
The eschatological premonitions of recent years, so characteristic of people of both the Classical and the New Middle Ages, are presented here by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse — the classic Plague, War, Famine and Death from the Book of Revelation by John of Patmos in a modern interpretation.