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In the Surrealist pictures of Paul Delvaux, the painter lets us glimpse an arcadian dream world--and then promptly casts doubt on the very existence of such a world. With a virtually Classical, old-master technique, he depicts figures for some still innocent paradise consorting with the dull denizens of our everyday prosaic world of fact. The mélange of Classical ideals and contemporary banality displaces his elegiac dream of primordial innocence into some never-never land of absurdity. Moreover, Delvaux invites us into those realms opened up by psychoanalysis in the course of [the twentieth] century: erotic complexes and repressions are dangled before us in the daylight of his pictures. Like most exponents of naturalistic Surrealism, Delvaux reveals his novelty of thought in his subject matter, not in his technique.
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Quondam © 2001.11.02 |