Warm Santa images

Christmas mines images from childhood. There is one in my mind that is more like Chirico than Santa. The colours from a warmly lit, tiny, chapel’s plate glass windows stretch, elongated like a yawn, on night snow. But overpowering it in the background is the giant, dark, windowless wall of a Soviet factory whose tall chimneys trail white plumes into a black sky. There is nothing but contradiction here. And it is about contradiction between the totalitarian will to conquer and a policy to be self-reliant that this piece is about.

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