Does the painter of “Ophelia” achieve the melancholy sense of helplessness more effectively than the painter of the first painting?”

Result #1

So far, at least, I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer, since there is not enough to see. But to be optimistic, I look forward to a new look at Lisbons work.

Result #2

 Do the paintings bring to mind Jean-Pierre Raffaels work in which the same lost melancholia of the ersatz artist, the same manic wanderlust, the same refusal to sit idly as the terrors of the great man, are reflected, perhaps, in the artist himself as an uprooted dandy of entropic drive. Indeed, it is in this mass of expressionistic activity—this manic energy, that is, the kind of madness an addict has become—that Hermès work seems most difficult. It is a melancholy in pursuit of those sublime moments that is just as banal as it is bold in its satire. It is the happiness that arises when the particular and the universal fall apart, when, like the image of the Lost World, we recognize, with amusement, that the crudeness of the world is the crudeness of our own life. What Hermès does with this despair of the ancient art of painting is often enough, in fact, quite amusing, although it is by no means the delight of reality.

Result #3

andres my dream, Etienne says. And hes always dreamy, and, yes, once the cataclysm happens, he can make sense of it and then maybe continue to follow his dream.

Result #4

Here it is precisely the contemporary painter who is in a crisis of confidence, and his reveries are accompanied by the sense that he is losing ground. The diagonals and brushstrokes are striking, but they only serve to suggest that the paintings are not paintings in the traditional sense, but only paintings, for the Duchampian distinction between the sublime and the barbarous. And they certainly have the aura of violent, harrowing excess, something that might be understood as erotic, but which can be understood as universal and that can be logically interpreted as ultimately indifferent to the artistic subject matter. The paintings, in effect, are incomplete if incomplete, that is, they fail to achieve the bittersweet purposiveness and tragic quiddity of Duchamps ambivalent realism.Here is the gallerys video. The person behind the camera is, quite literally, the painter himself, and it is he who, in his monologue, puts it all on display, putting it off for the viewer. He plays as if he had been liberated by an invisible bond between himself and his paintings, which provides him with a perpetual state of delirium and pleasure, a state of enervated intimacy. We see him on the way to an inevitable departure, and at the same time we observe him continuing his new transcendence. What Duchamp showed us was the strain of this sort of aestheticized eroticism—a strain that is not easily silenced, but which demands intense self-doubt and self-denial.

Result #5

The Depression was a terrible time for art, but it was a very beautiful time. The concept of exile, it seemed, was as important as the idea of a private heaven or hell in a public world, for art was important in that it could tell us who we were, and what was important for us. With all art we could be ourselves, some night of the soul.