Hello everyone! Today our Magazine is starting a new column that I hope you will like. As the name suggests, I was inspired by the Cannes Film Festival.
And as you know, the review called “Un Certain Regard” screens films that are not produced by the Major Movie Producers but mostly by new directors who have something original to tell us. After all, they depict reality from an original point of view. It’s a little bit what we would like to do.
From our experience, we know that a painting is generally to be looked at as a whole. What we would like to suggest here is to dwell on the gazes, “les regards“, of the protagonists of the paintings that we have been lucky enough to see and take pictures of live.
Often we have noticed that a picture of the detail of someone’s eyes tells us a lot about the character portrayed, about his/her emotions, his/her mood. It also tells us a lot about the era of the painting, about the historical period seen through the eyes of those who actually lived that period in the first person.
So, let’s loosen up then, let’s be absorbed by the gaze, and hence by the soul of the characters portrayed in all the various eras. In the gazes we are presenting to you today you can perceive all the various moods and emotions of all kinds; there is fear, wrath, losing oneself in the pleasure of love, but also elusive realities, blank faces that have been impenetrable for centuries, and about which we will never know anything; about which we can only fantasize.
So I invite you to observe these fantastic paintings and let your imagination wander, imagine the reasons for the fear, the rage, or guess what the two eyes that are scrutinizing us are trying to tell us …
As I said, we will be looking at the most varied styles and eras. From the Venetian school of the 16th century to contemporary art, from Baroque to Cubism. Alongside an inscrutable Renaissance gaze, we will observe the almost psychedelic eyes of Karel Appel.
Together with the sweetness of a nineteenth-century expression, we will try to understand what Jean Cocteau is trying to tell us with his three eyes that we cannot embrace and fathom at the same time. Perhaps he is suggesting the third eye that the Orientals speak about, the eye of intuition, of extrasensory perception, which we inhabitants of the contemporary world have lost almost entirely.
And of course we could not go without the genius of Pablo Picasso, who was the first to force us to deal with the various personalities that often coexist within each and everyone of us.
The two eyes of his face, apparently cast at random in the portrait, are the mirror of the inner bewilderment that we often experience. It almost seems to be the representation of what St. Paul would say “…. I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do.”
But there is someone we know everything about, like the beautiful, almost seductive John the Baptist by Cima da Conegliano
and we also know everything about sweet Mary, who, lowering her eyes, says “yes” to the pain that will pierce her heart.
Acceptance, the highest expression of Love.