"kaliente tufao de amor"artist: Edward Kaliente
On the outside: The painting is a man and a woman facing one another. The woman's hair breezes behind to suggest she is turned inward.
The figures are defined mainly in black.
The most fascinating and captivating part of this image is precisely its movement. The two figures seem to be in the middle of a whirlwind or tornado. The brush strokes are very fast and look quickly composed. The figures, however, are carefully planned, well outlined, and sure. Their lower bodies disappear in the red warmth.
The rest of the canvas is seemly and intentionally left blank. A place where a light shade of another color may have highlighted the image in the center. However, this absence of color and paint suggest that the central image is all that can exist. The mixture of red paints suggest passion, fire, or love. It is the movement of the red that allows the figures to stand still.
The inside: It is perhaps the moment we forget about the world, forget about the other colors, and are just swept away in the whirlwind of us and the color that envelopes it. A rare moment, but possibly one that can be only be well represented in art.
1 comment:
I really like your reading of this painting, and the way that you take your reader carefully through the form and the content of this piece. I wonder, though, if you might have challenged your "outside" and "inside" categories, and show how what you are talking about at the end—"the whirlwind"—serves precisely to confuse inside and outside, and perhaps even shows us how tenuous these designations are. This seems true even in relation to the two people in the painting: can we tell where one ends and the other begins? Or is their blurring part of the project of this piece? Your post is rather brief, and I feel like you could have teased out your last point—a subtle and fascinating one, indeed—with another paragraph of careful explanation: Why can only art represent this "rare moment"? How are we to know which colors to forget about, and which colors to be "swept away in"? Is this about a moment of heightened consciousness, or a complete loss of consciousness? Or is it, most likely, something in between? And if so, is it something that we *can* experience in our day-to-day lives, in our lives *as* art? Those are some questions that you could take on in another paragraph of this post.
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