LA FRAYEUR - BASED ON LE CRI / EDVARD MUNCH(2022)Digital Arts by Daniel Le Page (Dan Ar Pach).
Brief history of Norwegian art
Let's face it, art history books in which, in order to talk about the figurative evolution of a particular country, a tedious succession of names, definitions and dates are listed, turn out to be rather sterile in terms of learning, since the reader, who uses these soporific volumes even to fall asleep, will feel assailed by a multitude of notions, which will lead him or her to perceive the subject as unreachable, that is, too vast to be understood, remembered and assimilated. Therefore, after falling asleep last night, hugging a heavy Norwegian art history book, I want to summarize here the origins and evolution of this country's figurativism, assuming that its art was mainly established from the 19th, that is, during the flowering of landscape painting, since, until before that time, Norwegian creativity had been dominated by German and Dutch imports, as well as Danish influences. Returning to the aforementioned landscape painting, noteworthy is the work of Johan Christian Dahl, recognized as the father of the genre, but also that of Johannes Flintoe and the later Kitty Kielland and Frits Thaulow. The latter, also the author of Italian views, is considered, along with Christian Krohg and Erik Werenskiold, to be one of the leading figures in the art scene of his era, a period somewhat influenced by the stylistic features of Parisian Impressionism. Finally, other well-known landscape painters were Nikolai Astrup, Lars Hertervig, and Harald Sohlberg, important but often forgotten names, because, although it may not have been necessary to specify, the most famous artist from Norway remains without a shadow of a doubt Edvard Munch, a symbolist-expressionist who became world famous for The Scream, a masterpiece that we will investigate first in its original form and, later, in some of its contemporary reinterpretations by Artmajeur artists.
ANOTHER SCREAM (2023)Painting by Paddy.
Munch's The Scream
Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893): what is the genesis of this masterpiece? The answer lies in the troubled life of the master himself, who, together with Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, produced works of extreme subjective charge, aimed at forever overcoming the scientific and objective study of reality, carried on by the earlier currents of Impressionism and Pointillism, to anticipate the later and emotional Expressionism. Returning to Munch's personal affairs, his creativity was perpetually nourished by the sad events, which marked his existence, troubled by family losses, failures, alcoholism, neurosis and loneliness, aspects aimed at transforming the artist's daily life into a dramatic succession of emotional highs and lows, capable of making the econimic stability, which the artist achieved go unnoticed, finding a fair amount of success among his contemporaries. With regard to the masterpiece in question, however, it could at first glance be described as follows: on the right of the cartoon is the expanse of the sea including an island, subjects from which a wavy horizon line develops, aimed at evolving into a sky shaped by undulating and horizontal lines, on which is superimposed, in the center of the support, the presence of a serpentine human figure, intent on bringing his hands to his face to shout vigorously, while he is accompanied by two silhouettes of men, who proceed joined all the way to the back edge of the trail. It is only by taking into consideration the inner world of the creator, however, that the meaning of the masterpiece becomes apparent before our eyes, well represented by the words of Munch himself, who declared in this regard, "My friends kept walking and I was still trembling with fear...And I felt that a great infinite scream pervaded nature." It was precisely this feeling that inspired the painter to generate his best-known masterpiece, born, both from an event and from the emotions bound up with it, the result of an instant in which Munch, intent on walking near Kristiania, felt struck, at the moment when the sun sets into the sea, by the tremendous perception that the red sky was laden with bleeding clouds, ready to turn his friends into two pale silhouettes and nature around him into a cry, which the protagonist of the work replays in his existential drama. Finally, what has just been narrated is replayed, in part, in the innovative, original and unprecedented interpretations of the Scream by the artists of Artmajeur, who will also take us deeper into the narrative regarding the masterpiece dated 1893.
THE CRY OF THE FRIED EGG(2016)Painting by Sebastien Devore (Art-bracadabrac).
RESUME SCREAM BY MUNCH(2020)Painting by Messiaen Line.
Contemporary Screams
Messiaen Line: Resume Scream by Munch
In Line's acrylic, in which the more carefully stretched paint makes the swaying of the landscape appear less dramatic and "violent," the figure impersonating the interiority of Much, the "stylized" subject of the original, is replaced by that of a hallucinated Playmobil character, who, somewhat distinctly from his fellow humans, has lost the top of his head as he appears intent on screaming, probably precisely because of the absence of his scalp. In addition, the protagonist of Scream cover of Munch would almost make me rewrite the story from which the reference work originated, in that rather than a man stimulated by the cry of nature to realize an existential drama, later extended to the universal level, he seems to me inherently overwhelmed by his own and personal impulses, so much so that he appears indifferent to his surroundings, to the point of forgetting to cover even his nakedness. Moralisms aside, the Artmajeur artist's work reminds one of another aspect of the original, namely his ability to become, by his unconventional and extremely dramatic human figure, a symbol of the fragility and decadence of humankind, an aspect that can originate, either from a confrontation with the outside world, or from the introspective and alienating listening of our being.
MUNCH (2021)Digital Arts by Murilo Ferreira.
Murilo Ferreira: Munch
Level of discomfort shining through Ferreira's digital art? High, in fact very high! So much so that the work's protagonist, totally overwhelmed by the aforementioned cry of nature, despite the fact that the seascape background is absent in this work, is captured as he is visited by a pseudo panic attack, aimed at manifesting itself in the form of a plastic bag, which, having come to totally cover his face, does not allow him to breathe properly, trapping him in the most typical multitude of existential dramas, which sometimes chase around in our heads, afflicting and clogging them. In any case, if in this kindred context both the abstract background and the presence of a single subject are outside the reference to the 1893 masterpiece, the Artmajeur artist's work presents, so-called scream aside, further points of encounter with the original painting, which, in a similar manner, used complementary colors, aimed at conferring not only a disruptive evocativeness, but also an accentuation of the work's chromatic force. In addition, as stated by Ferreira herself, Munch represents a kind of self-portrait, which, unlike the one in the well-known tempera and pastel on cardboard, was created through a mixed technique of photography and digital collage, in which the creation process begins well before the photo is taken, since it is the artist who develops the clothes that he will use in the photos, in addition to the collages.
THE JAMES BROWN SCREAM (2023)Painting by Sergio Lanna (Sir Joe).
Sergio Lanna: The James Brown Scream
Whoa! I feel good, I knew that I would, nowI feel good, I knew that I would, nowSo good, so good, I got you
That's it! Precisely the above, i.e., one of James Brown's best-known songs, seems to be listening and singing at the same time, the protagonist of The James Brown scream, a painting in which the presence of the intangible melody is revealed by the words and notes depicted, as well as by the presence of the effigy's large red headphones. Just such inscriptions, immortalized on the naturalistic background, above and to the right of the protagonist's head, have some affinities with an anecdote concerning the Norwegian masterpiece, which, as only a few connoisseurs know, bears on its surface the following inscription, made in pen in the upper left corner of the cardboard: "it can only have been painted by a madman." According to some historians, this sort of psuedo "revelation" about the master's mental health may have been made by a visitor to the Munch Museet, a fact that would turn it into a sad and sterile work of vandalism. In any case, however, the aforementioned handwriting was also compared with that of the Norwegian master, following an investigation, the outcome of which allowed us to hypothesize, that the artist is the creator. In fact, from the studies of Mai Britt Guleng, curator of the Oslo museum, it could be confirmed that the painter would have added the phrase in 1895, reacting to some of the criticisms to which his work had been subjected, among them, the harsh ones of the medical student Johan Scharffenberg, who argued that: the author of The Scream could have been anything but sane. Mental condition aside, returning for a moment to the initial musical detail, it suggests to us an obvious interpretive difference between the 1893 original and the Artmajeur artist's remake, in that in the latter case music is recognized as a valuable tool to combat the evils of earthly life, aspects that in the former overwhelm and devastate man.
Olimpia Gaia Martinelli
