Nightmare#86038 60 X 40″ oc
This painting by T. F. Chen depicts a naked girl on the bed frightened by a falling angel in flamme while a leopard is just going to jump on her. Fortunately it is supposed to be her dream. The contrast between the dreamer on the bed and the figures in the dream is sharp as the menacing nightmare, occupying 2/3 of the canvas, seems to swallow the girl.In fact, the nude is Gauguin’s “vahine”, his adolescent Tahitian wife. In “Noa Noa” Gauguin wrote: “One day I had to go to Papetee and I promised to come back that night. A carriage that was returning that evening took me half way and the rest I had to do on foot. It was one o’clock in the morning when I got back …… The lamp had gone out and I entered the room was in darkness ….. I lit some matches and on the bed I saw Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching). The poor child recovered consciousness and I did everything I could to reassure her, “Never leave me again without any light!” The painting Gauguin did was “a young native girl lies in her belly, showing a portion of her lightened face. She lies on a bed covered with a blue pareo and a light chrome-yellow sheet ….. I,” Gauguin continued to say “wish to make a chaste picture of it, and imbue it with the native feeling, character, and tradition.” So Gauguin used purple to paint “a background of terror” with an old woman representing the Spirit of the dead watching over the soul of the scared young girl. Chen replaced Gauguin’s background with Chagall’s falling angel and a leopard jumping out of the grass beneath them, a rabbi slipping backward, a candle, several old houses in Chagall’s Vitebsk, a scene of Jesus Christ on the Cross and some planets and a space shuttle. The Bible scene and cosmic night may equally frighten the girl. Such shifting from Tahitian nightmare to Western mythology and high-tech may indicate the inevitable panic brought from the quick-changing outside world to this peaceful paradise of purity and simplicity.
– T. F. Chen |
Nightmare
On the Beach
2015 年 7 月 28 日