Images of Isolation

Today's blog entry will cover two works of two artists, who were most often associated with surrealism, but remained on the peripheries of the movement. The first one is the Belgian painter, René Magritte, and the second one is the Mexican icon, Frida Kahlo. Both painters were idyosyncraticly genuine representatives of the chance encounter of that infamous sewing machine and the umbrella.

René Magritte - The Lovers

While Magritte was introverted in his personal life, he was eccentric in his art, which made him a primary figure of surrealism. Like many of his fellow artists, he liked to shed a new light on everyday objects and experiences, bringing their forgotten or undiscovered meanings to the surface. The Lovers (1928) is a forcibly descriptive example for this phenomenon.

The painting; however, is a real riddle. The number of the associations that stem from it are just as infinite as the different, yet inherently similar forms of love which the work depicts. The painting may emphasize the eternal nature of love: although its subject and face might change, it borns and florishes throughout a person's lifetime. Or it might refer to the well-known saying: "love is blind." In that case, the piece suggests that even though the veiled faces are desperate to approach and touch each other, they will always be separated by the different identities they conceal.

(Perhaps one of the most beautiful and expressive summary of this intrinsic inaccessibility that two lovers experience is this quote from the movie, Unmade Beds: "That it's an illusion to pretend that we can bridge the gap between your thoughts and mine. For you, every person is like a planet and two different planets can never become one. Two people together will always be: one plus one. I preferred to think of us as bubbles, because when they touch, they merge into one another like when two people make love. But now I know what you meant. Two people together will always be one plus one.")

About making love: if we would like to interpret the title of the artwork literally, then we are dealing with a case of the mutual anonymity of two persons who only form a fragile bondage to find short-term pleasure through each other. In that situation, it is only the surface of each other that these two osculate. The rest, the individual characteristics of the face, which are the expletives of the soul, remains untouched in this encounter.

Although the treasury of associations in connection with The Lovers seems unexploitable, the ars poetica of Magritte, namely that the quest for a rational subtext is futile, might set bounds to one's inclination to spend hours trying to find the perfect interpretation for it. According to him, the mystery of art, just like the covered lovers in his painting, is genuinely unknowable.

Frida Kahlo -The Broken Column

Kahlo, who is perhaps the most renowned Mexican woman, was an incredibly colorful and talented artist. Her oeuvre encompasses numerous recurring themes: her own femininity, failures, losses, a strong sense of national identity, her leftist political notions, the effervescent versatility of nature, and the like. Yet, one of the most conspicuous features of her art is a constant presence of duality: although her motto was "viva la vida," the life that she celebrated so much was underborn with an unimaginable amount of suffering.

In her teenage years, Frida had to endure an almost fatal and life-changing bus crash, which mutilated her for the rest of her life, and put her thr ough a neverending series of unsuccessful procedures to hold her body together. Although she gave evidence of an unparalelled fortitude regarding physical pain, she had to withstand plenty of hurtful events due to the infidelity of her adored husband, Diego Rivera, as well.

The Broken Column (1944) is one of the most powerful works among her countless self-portraits. Kahlo was a naive painter, and an autodidact; still, her paintings carry an extremely impressive and cathartic sense of anguish. The piece reveals her two-sided affliction: the broken spine symbolizes her suffering on a somatic level, and the immeasurable amount of small nails lodged in her skin stand for the emotional distress she was experiencing owing to Rivera's affairs. Kahlo always depicts her feelings in a bewilderingly sincere manner: the dense tears in her eyes show that the aches she has to sustain are both constant and excruciating. Moreover, contrarily to the majority of her artworks, in which she depicts herself in the company of her beloved pets, or her husband, she is all alone in this painting. This shows that she was always experiencing a sense of imperishable loneliness, since her dreadful and unique condition isolated her from the people around her.

Although the audience gets the impression that the iron corset is the only thing that saves her from utter disintegration, her incredible fortitude is also present on the picture. Even though she's crying, she stares at the viewer in an unflinching manner. Her glance and her posture both convey a sense of strength and proudness. Although she is miserable, Frida is invincible in her nudity and vulnerability.

Another point of interest concerning the painting is the ionic column that she inserted in the middle of her open torso. The chiseled and classical column also projects a double meaning: first, Frida's inclination to use art as therapy, secondly, her greatest achievement as an artist, namely to create the aesthetics of anguish and deterioration, which celebrates the pulsation of life under the shadows of endless suffering.