I would like to examine David Hokney’s (1937) famous 1967 painting A Bigger Splash, pretending to know nothing about the author’s life and analysing only the formal and chromatic elements in the painting. Convinced that an author of visual texts expresses everything he has to tell us through the grammatical elements of his discipline and that, in Hokney’s case, we find in the painting, within which unconscious elements of his personality, as well as of ours as observers, could also […]
Edward Munch, Puberty (detail), 1894-95, Oslo National Gallery The works of Edward Munch (1863-1944) have fascinated me more and more over the years. In Puberty of 1894-95, certain formal and perspective distortions typical of his mature language, to which this painting belongs, are not present. This work has a more intimate or apparently less explosive character than his other more violent and strident works, both in terms of colour and formal forcing. The explosiveness of this painting resides in […]
In one of my previous speeches I dealt with the spatio-temporal trends inherent in the composition (https://www.danilosantinelli.it/danilos-blog/spatio-temporal-trend-of-the-composition/), for the sake of completeness I would now like to introduce some aspects concerning the three basic geometric forms, which are also precious compositional tools: square, circle and triangle. The square, distinguished by its four equal sides and angles, has no motion, it seems to close on itself, apparently motionless in its solidity suggested by the right angles. The stability and […]
In the previous article (https://www.danilosantinelli.it/danilos-blog/illusoriety-of-realism/) I pointed out that talking about realism within visual texts is improper. In fact, they use codes that address our way of seeing and thinking about the world, and therefore our perception of it, which is far from being real is instead distorted: in this sense, the example of the perspective convergence that our gaze – and the drawing consequently reproduces – perceives – was given. The sense of realism is therefore given by proposing […]
