Curio Cabinet

Mateo

2020

spray paint on carpet

86.6 x 59 in (220 x 150 cm)

Montreal, Canada

This isn't your grandma's Perisan rug! French artist Mateo, who lives and works in Montreal, Canada, has recently gone viral, thanks to his highly detailed, spray painted portraits on Persian rugs. In the untitled painting above, a woman wearing a head-covering looks down, with closed eyes. The intricate yellow, blue and red patterns of the rug frame the woman's face and mouth. The painting is detailed enough for viewers to see lifelike creases on the woman's eyelids and lips. Mateo became interested in various cultures' traditional crafts after studying ceramics in Barcelona. He began incorporating patterns and other elements of these crafts into his street art, and developed a particular love for hand-woven carpets. According to Mateo, "Carpets are one of the most ancient, visually rich, and meaningful traditional arts that can be found. They are traditionally weaved by women, which is why I chose to represent women's portraits on them." That's one modern way to pay homage to the past!
 
Image credit & copyright: Mateo
 
Written by: Maria C.
 

Below: two more of Mateo's untitled paintings on carpet
 

This certainly looks like frightful fun! As Halloween draws near, so do Halloween festivals, like the Historic Irvington Halloween Festival, in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis, Indiana. The event draws thousands of visitors each year. In the photo above, The Black Hat Society, a nonprofit group of theatrical witches, prepares for the festival's parade. The gathering features one member dressed as a pumpkin-headed monster, while most wear black witch costumes. The Historic Irvington Halloween Festival has been called both the oldest and the largest Halloween festival in the U.S. (though this is difficult to measure and a few other festivals also lay claim to these titles). When it began in 1927, the festival was a one-night event, featuring music and a parade. After spending several years on hiatus, the festival returned in 1946, and became a week-long affair, featuring vendors, food, performances, and even a ghost tour. The festival celebrates its 74th year in 2020, and while the street fair won't take place due to the pandemic, some attractions that can work with outdoor social distancing and PPE mask will still take place, like the ghost tour, ensuring attendees still have a spooo-ky good time!

Image credit & copyright: Michael Sullivan Photography/Historic Irvington Halloween Festival
 

Written by: Maria C.

Below: entrants in the festival's pumpkin-carving contest
 

Title: After the Attack. Dressing station near Plevna

Artist: Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904)
Created: 1881
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 72 x 15.8 in (183 x 40.2 cm)
 

They say "art reveals truth," but the truth isn't always pleasant. Especially in After the Attack. Dressing station near Plevna, wherein Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin shows the grim aftermath of a battle in the Russo-Turkish War on the Balkan Peninsula. White medical tents overflow with wounded soldiers, most of whom lie on the ground, outside. Many have visible wounds, and some are wrapped in bandages. Having fought in the war himself, Vereschagin dismissed the popular practice of portraying battles as glorious or fanciful. He instead committed himself to realism, using his art to protest war and violence. This unique perspective helped make Vereshchagin one of the only Russian artists to gain international fame during his lifetime. It goes to show that when art has something important to say, people are often compelled to listen.

Below: Another of Vereshchagin's war paintings, At the Fortress Walls Let Them Enter, and a video explaining Vereshchagin's artistic approach.

A cubist unraveled.

Many consider him the most important artist of the 20th Century, though others in his lifetime would ridicule and scorn his seemingly primitive style. Born on this day in 1881, Pablo Picasso helped invent a new cubist art style and became a larger-than-life public figure—in spite of his many personal struggles to develop a wholly unique artistic identity.  

Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, to a homemaker mother, María Picasso y López, and a painter father, Don José Ruiz y Blasco. By the time Picasso was seven, his father was training him to sketch and paint, and Picasso completed his first painting, Le Picador, at age nine. Picasso's mother even said that her son's first words were "piz piz", a shortened version of lápiz, or "pencil", in Spanish.  

Picasso's family moved to Barcelona, when he was 13, and his father took a teaching job at the School of Fine Arts, and convinced school officials to let his son take an entrance exam, despite his age. Picasso got in, and just a few years later, at age 16, struck out on his own for Spain's most prestigious art school: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There, his paintings began slipping from traditional realism into a modernism, in which striking colors and exaggerated features were meant to convey specific emotions.  

At age 19, Picasso moved to Paris, rented an apartment with a friend, and co-founded a small magazine, contributing his artwork. In 1901, one of the most famous periods of Picasso's career—his "Blue Period"—began. Paintings he created during this four-year period were rendered in shades of blue and green with somber subjects, such as starving people. Picasso's own poverty greatly influence his Blue Period, as did the suicide of his friend, Carles Casagemas.
 

By 1907, Picasso shifted into his "Rose Period," marked by a use of warmer colors. He caught the eye of prominent art collectors, like Gertrude Stein, and art dealers, like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who owned a gallery in Paris. Kahnweiler praised Picasso's work even as the artist's style became more experimental. In 1907, influenced by African artifacts and Iberian sculptures he had viewed in museums, Picasso painted one of his most important works: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The oil painting portrayed five nude women on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona famous for its brothels. The figures were composed of multiple flat planes, with mask-like faces. The image was immediately controversial. Fellow modern artist Henri Matisse (with whom Picasso had a lifelong rivalry) famously mocked the work, calling it crude.
 

There was no stopping Picasso's artistic experimentation, however. By 1909, he and his artist friend, Georges Braque, developed an entirely new style: cubism. Marked by an amalgamation of geometric shapes, cubist paintings were like nothing the art world had ever seen. Some looked almost three-dimensional, with images "popping off" the canvas. Picasso and Braque began using pieces of cut paper to create cubist pieces, thus elevating collage into the fine art world for the first time. By the time he married, in 1918, Picasso's art had made him rich and famous.  

Some of Picasso's personal beliefs shone through in the pacifist art of his later years. One of his most famous paintings, Guernica, portrays the aftermath of a Nazi bombing on the town of Guernica, in Basque. The painting's screaming figures include a terrified horse and a mother cradling a limp child in her arms. Guernica is considered one of history's most powerful anti-war artworks.
 

Picasso remained a prominent public figure for the rest of his life, passing away at age 91. Today, he is remembered for his breaking and redefining of the art world's rules. As Picasso himself said, "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."  

Below: one of Picasso's most famous cubist paintings, Guernica.

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: Distanced Figures 3

Artist: George Condo (b. 1957)
Created: 2020
Medium: oil on canvas
 

Strange art may be just the thing for these strange times. It certainly seemed that way at the Frieze New York art fair, which took place online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Distanced Figures 3, a piece by contemporary artist George Condo, fetched a selling price of $2 million at the show. The piece features a man and woman, rendered in a cubist-caricature style with their faces and bodies separated into geometric shapes. Their features, from the man's oversized nose to the woman's goofy smile, look cartoonish, as if ready for a silly night at the opera, or a vacation from a "wascally wabbit". This feeling is enhanced by the way the figures stare straight at the viewer, standing side by side as if deliberately posing from a distance. The painting's bright colors, mostly electric blues and violets, adds to its surreal feel and emphasize the feeling of distance for which the piece is named. Condo's art often portrays and provokes uncomfortable emotions. It's easy to see why he refers to his unique style as "psychological cubism"!
 

Below: two more of Condo's paintings, Big John and The Laughing Cavalier.
 

Image credit & copyright: George Condo/Simon Lee Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Hauser & WIrth
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Take a look at all the flags of the world in the attached picture. You’ll notice most are just some combination of stripes, crosses, stars, and seals. And every color under the sun. Except purple! Of the 196 flag-bearing nations, there is no purple. Well, there are a few tiny exceptions. The Caribbean island Dominica (population 70,000) has a flag featuring the purple-chested sisserou, the country’s national bird. And the Nicaraguan flag contains a rainbow—which technically contains a tiny band of violet but I challenge you to find it (see image below). There’s also the Balearic Islands, an autonomous region of Spain. Its flag contains a dark blue coat of arms some have called purple—usually after a few nights spent on the party island of Majorca. Most flags are red, white, and blue. According to The Flag Stories project (see link below), it’s because of the multi-cultural symbolism of those three colors. In almost every society, red connotes blood, bravery, strength, and struggle. White symbolizes peace, purity, and religion. Blue can mean sea, sky, truth, peace, and loyalty. But purple would seem to fit quite nicely into the desired attributes of a country. It represents power, royalty, sophistication and curiosity. Not to mention Prince. Maybe the Curious Nation should officially secede? Our flag would obviously be purple!