by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Bacchanalia

0.0 x 0.0

Bacchanalia, Graphite. Pulp paper. 30x30cm The whole bacchanal scene is filled with a perfume from the 18th century, from the Fêtes galantes of Watteau to the Commedia dell’arte, and the swarms of nudes by Boucher… The variety of postures, gestures, faces, bodies, their swarming, their gaze turned in all directions, drowned in drunkenness, or interrogators, their contortions, frail or more fleshy limbs, fragments of figures superimposed, piled up, intertwined, confused… It is a theatre or opera scene that we are dealing with here, drawn with confounding dexterity and boundless imagination, once again. Heads, buttocks, unfinished bodies, apparitions, a festival of monsters or ghosts and beautiful dishevelled countesses, Pierrots… A painting from the North of Europe brought back to the South, the Netherlands bent to the law of France or Italy… That of ancient Rome, too. The lines here are explicit, there fade away, the silhouettes, in the same way, are figurative or almost indistinguishable, all this sinuous, stirs, agitates in all directions, in an extremely mastered composition despite the frenzy that seizes all the characters… Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative