| Artist: | Chirico, Giorgio de |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Enigma of a Day | |
| Date of Work: | 1914 | |
| Nationality: | Italian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Italian Metaphysical School | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: a favorite haunt of de Chirico: the piazza, or city square, strangely deserted except for a statue and two small figures seen in the far distance. "He is the enemy of trees and the friend of statues," wrote the poet Apollinaire about de Chirico. Here he creates a windless atmosphere; it is difficult to determine the time of day with certainty. Odd juxtaposition of a classical arcade and factory smoke stacks; past and present collide here in a mysterious space in which perspectives collide, as well. The effect is disorienting and anxious. Disembodied, dark shadows take on a menacing life of their own. The image is an enigma; it is as closed and cryptic as the shut up box car behind the statue to the right. Even though the style is representational, the end result is highly abstract and metaphysical; it is not a landscape so much as a mindscape. Style: de Chirico deliberately uses perspective against itself. Instead of using perspective to create an ordered, measured space, he gives us a surplus of vanishing points and orthogonals that do not line up. As the perspective goes askew, the ground gives way, and our security in a solid, tangible, concrete world is undermined. Renaissance perspective was a system for rationalizing space; de Chirico reverses those terms by turning perspective into an irrational system. He upsets the order of things with a dream logic of odd displacements, condensations, and fetish symbols. Despite the fact that de Chirico's father was an engineer, the artist turns the science of perspective into a science of fantasy. We are left with a weightless world, suspended in a void. Context: the year WWI broke out. Italy is going through its own cultural crisis. It is an old country with a long, rich cultural history caught between its glorious past and its modern present. De Chirico suggests this time warp in his referencing of classical arcades and modern technology (the factory smoke stacks). There is a sense of inertia and paralysis in this frozen scene that suggests the dilemma of being stuck in time. De Chirico's disruption of conventional reality and logic foreshadows the Surrealist movement to come. | ||
