THE KEY (2023) Painting by Natalya Chepulskaya.
The macabre, sin, death, and the answer ...
A nineteenth-century cultural, literary and artistic movement, which, revealed only later in its identity, will illustrate to us, through some of its masterpieces, the metaphor of life in which each of us has stumbled, aimed at taking on the guise of a figurative tale, intent on facing the darkness of temptation and the limitations of vanitas, to rise again in the serene and lofty awareness of the purest simplicity of being, of existing, of feeling and thus: Of trying to walk on this planet, despite a thousand looming and suffering, adversities, fears and worries. The allegory of our life cycle begins with a dark thought, namely the macabre one that leads us to sin, showing, at first, somewhat frightening, but revealing visions, which I wanted to summarize, bringing as an example the image of the most iconic animal portrayed by Odilon Redon, French painter and engraver, who, in his noirs series, favored the use of black and white to approach a world of demons, winged figures, and severed heads, clearly inspired by the equally dark work of the likes of Francisco Goya, Edagar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire. Returning to the beast depicted by Redon, I refer to The Weeping Spider, that is, one of the artist's most enigmatic works, capable of shaking the viewer's soul with its unusual combination of absurdity and sadness, probably aimed at openly siding against the realist point of view, thus anticipating Impressionist rebellion and giving image to the following words written in Spleen by Baudelaire: "A dumb people of infamous spiders tends its nets at the bottom of our brains." In the same way, in fact, the anthropomorphic character portrayed by the French artist weaves a web of emotions, having the purpose of trapping the viewer in a snare of pietism, as those who cross the spider's gaze cannot shy away from pitying his mysterious damnation. At this point a spontaneous question arises, how can the narrative be continued by following the above intentions, and thus moving from the theme of the macabre to that of sin?
Odilon Redon, The crying spider, 1881. Charcoal. Private collection, Netherlands.
I found the answer in the year 1842, the date when the spider acquired an evil reputation thanks to Jeremias Gotthelf's Biedermeier novella, an allegorical tale in which the animal symbolizes the evil works and moral consequences of a pact made with the devil. Having thus come to the subject of transgressions, instead of dealing with a moralistic tale, I leave the floor to Franz von Stuck's painting, which titled The Sin (1893), immortalizes the torso of a woman with very white skin, whose shoulders are enveloped by a snake, an animal that, together with the protagonist, turns its gaze of defiance and provocation precisely toward the viewer. This new Eve, depicted within a dark environment evocative of the otherworldly dimension, personifies sin through her nature as an erotic and sensual woman, which gives her the role of a predator eager to impose her power over her partner. The theme of death arises as a result; in fact, it is enough to think of how sinful souls will be punished only after the junta of their departure, a moment when a skeleton wielding a scythe, wearing a black cloak fitted with a hood, will appear before them. A similar character can be found in Klimt's Death and Life, a painting executed between 1908 and 1915, having the purpose of illustrating the allegory of our life course, through the construction of a single-loop figurative narrative, set on the dialogue of two specular parts: the right one, which vividly colored, makes explicit, through the multiple forms of the human body, the concepts of love, friendship and motherhood, and the left zone, in which the solitary arrival of death is revealed.
Gustav Klimt, Death and life, 1910s. Oil on canvas, 1,805 x 2,005 mm. Leopold Museum.
Frida Kahlo, Viva la vida, 1945. Oil on masonite, 720 x 520 mm. Museo Frida Kahlo collection. @moncapilla
The latter effigy seems to be anxiously waiting to reveal itself among the living, in order to suddenly beat them with its stick, wrap them in its cloak and deprive them of their heartbeat, sending the following macabre message: everyone, in the course of his or her existence, can be struck down, at any moment, by the inexorable onset of the skull with the scythe. At this point there appears before our eyes, as a kind of luminous revelation in the misery of our existential precariousness, the saving figure of Frida Kahlo, a painter who in the painting Viva la vida (1954), despite her poor health, the amputation of one of her legs and the imminent nearness of her departure, optimistically immortalizes the different shades of several watermelons, symbols of maturing changes, to be understood as metaphors for the various stages of a life that, although not eternal, deserves to be lived, until her last breath, with enthusiasm and resilience. Finally, returning to the point of departure, we reveal how this narrative has united all masterpieces marked by a Symbolist approach, that is, more or less akin to the intentions pursued by the aforementioned nineteenth-century movement, whose intellectual and artistic attitude pursued the goal of expressing individual emotional experience through the depiction of personal, spiritual and mystical subjects, which, often obscure, were oftentimes linked to the sphere of religion, mythology, dream and nostalgia for an ancient world far removed from modern decline. This approach to figurative inquiry continues in the contemporary artworks of Artmajeur artists, particularly those by: Yaroslav Kurbanov, Svetlana Savitskaya and Herve Fleury (RV).
AUTUMNAL MELODY (2022) Painting by Anna Grazi.
VOLLMOND (2008) Painting by Yaroslav Kurbanov.
Yaroslav Kurbanov: Vollmond
How does one recognize that Kurbanov's nude is a Symbolist work and not a "mere," "superficial" and sensual exaltation of the bodily attributes of femininity? Vollmond's purely figurative approach, realized by mendiate the genre of the nude, enhances individual emotional experience, since, referring to the artist's own statements, it translates into images the intimate words uttered by Jacques, within Shakespeare's pastoral play titled As You Like It (1599), namely, "All the world's a stage, and all men and women are but actors: They have their exits and their entrances: and a man in his time plays many parts, his acts are seven ages. " This part of Act II intends to compare the world to a play, specifically, referring to the seven stages of life, within which, human beings, throughout their entire existence, play multiple parts or roles, extremely akin to the different parts of a drama or play. Within the history of Symbolist art, similarly, this subdivision into existential acts can be associated with Much's The Three Stages of Woman (1984) and Klimt's The Three Ages of Woman (1905), masterpieces in which the protagonists undergo changes due to the passage of springs.
SPEAKING (2023) Painting by Svetlana Savitskaya.
Speaking: Svetlana Savitskaya
We have known and recognized, during our study of the history of art, some angelic beings depicted as mere observers of the scene, or, rendered as able-bodied message-bearers, ringers, responsible for falling in love, demonic traitors, etc, but, probably, we have never had the opportunity to "spy" on them in their daily lives, that is, when they, for example, meet with each other at the bar near their homes, to talk about their more or less salvific activities, exchange information about the wishes of the boss (God), gossip about the devil's misdeeds, and ironize about the many sins to be healed in the world. Precisely this latter informal context, in which the angels are portrayed in their routine, rather than in sacred or secular events of a certain depth, intensity and involvement, is well rendered by Savitskaya's painting, within which, the motif of gathering and discussion of the two calm and relaxed protagonists is made explicit by the image manifested above their heads: a map, which, through the slightly "blurred" and evanescent depictions of conflicts and fights, hints at terrible situations to be averted. Finally, the study of a salvific intervention by these calm and sipping angels is contrasted with the dark and ruthless winged being of the Symbolist work The Deathg of the Grave Digger (1895), a painting by Carlos Schwabe in which the said creature intervenes in human affairs by bringing, instead of life, joy, glad tidings and problem solving, the looming of death.
Herve Fleury (RV): Comedy 4
I introduce Fleury's Comedy 4 by talking about, and later explaining why, the Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Violin by the Symbolist Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss painter, draftsman, sculptor and graphic artist, who, in the masterpiece in question, associated his image as an artist, intent on drawing colors from the palette through the use of a paintbrush, with the presence of a nefarious skeleton, who, arranged anguishily behind him, is taken to strum the aforementioned instrument with ease and pleasure. The depicted Böcklin, whose expression suggests precisely the listening to such an ominous and nefarious melody, remains still, as if frozen, in the above-mentioned action, probably imagining how such music will resonate, surely in a similar way, at the moment of his decisive departure. Without a shadow of a doubt, contemporary sensibilities would accompany such a sonata to a music video, which, having as its protagonist the unfailing features of the skull, could well be transformed into the repetitive flow of the bizarre, mocking and "scary" animations of the protagonists of Comedy 4.
Olimpia Gaia Martinelli