I am fascinated.
Looking at Picasso’s Guernica
at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid,
I'm totally captivated by the overwhelming epic collage of shapes and planes. It is tempo, mass and stress, a rhythmic contradiction of forms and volumes on a
massive twelve by twenty-six foot scale.
A palette of gray, black, and white colors push and pull against a background of broken hard-edged, jagged
geometric structures.
A wailing woman clutching a baby in her arms is
jumbled together with that of a horse whinnying in
agony. A
skull-like head of a bull is formed by the angle of its front leg.
Contrapuntal images abound. Out of a
broken sword, a flower grows. A blazing light shines overhead. A woman sticks
her arm through a window. In her hand, she holds a lighted lamp. A person is engulfed in
flames. Part of his body forms a light-emitting crack in the wall. Beside him
is a dove.
Whereas the norm is to opt for a fantasy of simple clarified
existence, Picasso dissects the whole into fragments, imbuing each with a
contour that is tense with a beauty normally unseen. An array of perspectives is laid out on a flat plane: some chaotically-oriented, several fused in unexpected ways. A
single frontal face is simultaneously shown with its lateral view. Eyes and noses
and mouths are interconnected. One face becomes All Faces.
His is a perspective that invites the eye to discover that the
complex abundance of life is exactly what is.
Oneness resides in Simultaneity.
Allness consolidates the Multiplicity.
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