- Fatigue of War Tarot by Alexander Daniloff
- Self-published – available via website
- €30
- Reviewed by Clara Z
I first spotted this remarkable Majors deck while browsing a Russian webstore a couple of years before Putin launched his ‘special military operation’ in 2022. Its presence alongside the more commonplace Tarot fare landed quite a blow, visually and psychologically, my initial feelings split between fascination and the urge to look away. It’s not the first time I’ve recoiled from the work of an artist, before revisiting with loins girded. And so I did in this case. Artistic considerations aside, I questioned whether these challenging images were a helpful lens through which to view the Tarot, and what the prism of Tarot might reveal about the deck’s theme. Crucially, was I ready to disappear down what looked like a particularly cavernous and forbidding rabbit hole? Such was the trepidation of one who has, thus far, been spared direct contact with war and its privations.
Although he now resides in Italy, the artist, Alexander Daniloff, hails from the besieged Donbas region in the disputed south-eastern borderlands of modern-day Ukraine, whose very name translates as ‘borderland’. He is ethnically Russian, and his hometown of Donetsk is under Russian occupation, though his family network extends into both nation states. This deck was published in 2018, in response to the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas that began in 2014. It was Daniloff’s artistic virtuosity and my desire to better comprehend his message in light of the ongoing conflict which drove me to re-examine and eventually purchase it.
Each image consists of an upright circular frame above a second circle – perpendicular to the first – which is elliptical in perspective. The circular frames are fashioned of wood, stone, metal, branches or thorns, which support vegetation, beings or paraphernalia such as shackles, veils, withered vines, angels, demons or The Fool’s helmet. One such frame is Fortuna’s Wheel, while another is a demonic cross-sectioned cranium cradling The Devil’s inferno. The lower circle is a ‘spotlight’ on the arena pounded by invaders, levelled by battle, occupied by rulers and suffered by captives, or the abyss into which liquids flow, the living fall, the dead languish, and whence all manner of things rise up. Although the scenes are fearsome, often chaotic, and oppressive – as though the action and characters bear down upon the viewer – this framework puts it into a theatrical context, reminding us that this is essentially entertainment, however grim, and not reality. For me, it also calls forth the circles of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the sephiroth of the Tree of Life.
The collection is a chilling procession largely sapped of colour, in sepia tones of charred and ashen browns and greys, with ghostly blues and faded yellows woven in almost imperceptibly. The action is thrown into relief by the deep blue of dark night, often pierced by golden stars. On two cards, the intense carmine reds of imperial banners and hellfire dominate the scene, and on another pair a watery, portentous pink ‘red sky’ presides. In Daniloff’s clean and precise visual style we may see influences from the medieval Nordic art he admires, along with hints of Dürer, Bruegel the Elder and Cranach. The stark dystopian scenes he presents, containing elements of caricature and cartoon, wouldn’t seem entirely out of place in a modern graphic novel.

Within the images are echoes of the centuries of invasion and war endured by the peoples of Daniloff’s homeland; the Black Death, the Byzantine Empire, medieval instruments of destruction, ‘The Ruin’ of the seventeenth century, the Mongol khanates, slavery, the Holodomor of the 1930s, the Nazi occupation, and internecine war all suggest themselves in these images, presented in a style the artist, who is also an actor, director and set designer, describes as ‘Brechtian’. Reference to the groundbreaking work of the twentieth century German playwright Bertholt Brecht may reveal much about the deck’s artistic devices and political thrust. But lacking the dialogue or action of a play to move the attention along, his close-up ‘freeze frames’ can be overpowering, like diabolical stills from an anachronistic documentary of war.

As with Brecht, whose work demands the intellectual engagement of spectators (his term for the audience), this deck takes effort to negotiate. A couple of Brechtian methods at play are an estrangement effect created using non-realistic scenes – variously grotesque, absurd, and sardonic – which at once put them at odds with expectation and with traditional Tarot connotations, forcing viewers to ask uncomfortable questions. The ‘historicisation’ of characters and action may distance them from current events, while at the same time suggesting parallels with the present day, beyond propaganda, beyond lionising or demonising media reports. An exclusion of sentimentality leaves viewers free to react authentically based on their own analysis, rather than being constrained by artistic representations of emotion. These devices encourage a collaborative vision of the subject in a way a naturalistic or romanticised approach may not, the result being – to my mind – a palpable sense of the subjugation, destruction and pitiful waste which distills into the ‘fatigue’ of the deck’s title. Love it, loathe it, there is no way to remain unaffected. To quote Brecht: “Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Those familiar with the Major Arcana will encounter few barriers to the symbolism, although some references may be accessible only to those acquainted with the regional culture. Each card is more or less recognisable without having to look at its name, except perhaps Temperance, whose character is anything but temperate, and The Lovers, whose fate is utterly sealed. Identifiable or not, the images generally position the cards at the very extreme and inverted reaches of their common attributions. Reflecting the corruption of war, the desperate scenes parody the trumps with bitter contradictions and exaggerations too disruptive of their dignity to be read other than with the darkest dose of irony. In confronting clichéd and superficial interpretations of the cards these gross distortions give us an invaluable tool for contemplation and study; the effect is both edifying and, at times, deeply moving. I have resisted the urge to express further thoughts on the cards as that would be to herd the reader too far into my headspace and risk colouring individual perception, thereby defeating the artist’s intention.
‘Fatigue of War’ started life as a series of acrylics later adapted for Tarot. As Daniloff had already published a couple of decks at the time of the paintings, the fusion of his vision with the Major Arcana was perhaps an inevitable progression. His motivation in depicting our very archetypes stripped and crumbling – choice snatched away, justice overturned, sacred mysteries violated, conquest or death the only closure – would appear to be an attempt at catharsis, an exposé of the reality behind the propaganda machine, and an expression of the moral imperative to call a halt on war and the conditions which allow it to thrive.
Of the war and the Tarot deck, Daniloff says: “It is a deep pain to see how two countries dear to you are destroyed. Even though I was born and raised in Ukraine, I am a Russian citizen and I belong to Russian culture. This is how the series of paintings ‘The Labours of War’ was born and was subsequently shaped into the series of Tarots. I am an artist and it is important for me to find the right language for the theme. I look for the plastic expression that manages to make the content explicit. I don’t like describing images: what I wanted to say. I prefer to hear from viewers what emotions my images arouse. My cards are intuitive; everyone gets what they can.
“I haven’t experienced the war myself. My friends and relatives, yes, they are under rocket attacks. I have relatives in both Ukraine and Israel where rocket rains happen from time to time. The whole set of paintings and Tarot cards is just my imagination through their eyes. Another thing I have observed is propaganda. No war can be without propaganda, without explanations who you should hate and why you should kill. Propaganda is one of the pivots of war. Because words corrupt the soul first.” The 90x145mm cards are a decent size to display the detail of the art. The card stock is fairly lightweight with rounded edges, a low-gloss/satin finish and a flimsy but adequate folding envelope-style tuck box. A signed limited-edition certification card is included. This 22-card limited edition deck is principally a collectors’ item, its value as a functional Tarot within the mainstream community negligible.
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