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| Odilon Redon - Buddha - 1905-10 |
To reflect on the meaning of color in painting, we can avail ourselves of the story, human and artistic by Odilon Redon. He was lonely childhood, which contracted nightmares and obsessions that accompanied him for a long time. His introverted nature drove him to an adventure highly introspective and 'black', because, for many years devoted himself almost exclusively to drawing with graphite and black crayon. These works show recurring themes, dark and heavily symbolic: grinning giant spiders, severed heads from the martyrdom and offers on trays, floating eyeballs and filaments that are floating in sweltering nights. The intimate suffering led him to investigate the interior, to confront that nightmare all along what Jung has called a "path of discovery." His paintings are showing highly significant: the spider the weaver of the winding labyrinths of the psyche, allusive beast insidiously that the painter wanted to win through the redemptive power of thought, symbolized by the number of heads without bodies that have populated his work and the eye, often depicted as the top face to seek salvation a higher vision, is the vehicle of a ruthless "by the black", an inexhaustible of investigation to which everything is sacrificed, so the man comes to be transformed into paroxysmal Cyclops.
And this totality paid off: after years of voluntary confinement in the "black", Redon was somewhat out of the tunnel, and finally landed in color. Something had happened, something that, in my opinion, the critics have not been able to understand, but that has lead to a radical change. Intuition tells me that his fighter, just because so total, had an unexpected result: it brought the artist, well beyond his own intentions, beyond the mind, at least for a moment. The spontaneous emergence of meditation has kidnapped color. This change is marked by the work "The eyes closed" (1890); from this picture you can imagine that the artist is totally taken in, and gently surrender to the mysterious flow of the interior. Since then there have been more anxious eyes bulging, no more monsters paradoxical of the mind, but winged creatures, fluffy colors, soft shapes emerging from the color, "aquarium of the dream," and even a Buddha near the tree of Bhod. Maybe Redon has experienced something similar to what is called satori in the East, an episode of temporary lighting: For a moment the curtain of the mind opens, and is fertilized by the beauty of the Real. From this comes an extraordinary energy and nutrients, which the artist dedicated himself to show the colors more vivid. The famous painting "The Cyclops" (1898-1900) seems to confirm my intuition, and in it we see a Cyclops who is gentle, far more peaceful than those of previous drawings "noir", which points from a human figure, perhaps androgynous, lying on a bed of flowers. The eye of thought is looking at something that is hard to understand, something that is not yet fully awake, you feel the amazement, even disbelief, yet it seems almost smell the cradle of floral scent that the artist had warned for which could not doubt it. In other works he revived the issue of closed eyes, but with an evident feeling of nostalgia, as if unable to recontact the extraordinary inspiration. Satori is a passenger, is a taste that triggers hunger of the Essential, probably following the hunger of the Transcendent The next pictures were made like an elusive mirage, sublimated in dreamy colors.
Then, the last phase of his work, Redon seems to have dispersed almost hope, and one last reminder of the emphasis of the Light took the form of the many bouquets of flowers, favorite subject, then, placed in pots that seem to want to keep alive the memory, including the colorful flowers are the symbol. In these pictures, it captures a poignant nostalgia, tinged with regret, the pot (perhaps a symbol of the mind that remembers) often seems almost unworthy of the flowers it contains, backgrounds and come back often to be populated by shadows. Emblematic of this is "Buttercup in a blue vase" (1914): a vase blue, contemplative and soul, has red flowers, yellow and pink, one of them fell, a large shadow swallows it right, the entire composition is substantially blurred, as if it were to disappear the next.
novel by Satvat THE TAO OF PAINTING - Bastogi, 2009
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