Happiness

#95016     66 X 48″      ac

• Matisse: “Odalisque with a Tambourine” (1925-26),
• “The Black Fern” (1948), “The Yellow Curtain” (1915)
• Chagall: “The Red Roofs” (1953-54)

Matisse’s sojourn in Nice after 1920 released a series of “Odalisque” in full richness and fragrance. It’s modern and exotic at the same time traditional and classic: easy yet elaborate, simplified yet expressive. Matisse indeed has pushed his “nude” beyond Western rendering, bringing sensuality, vivacity and virtuosity.In this painting “Happiness” by T. F. Chen, Matisse’s Odalisque still occupies squarely the canvas. Replacing original window panels and the tambourine, we see Chagall’s red roofs with an artist holding his palette and bowing. The posture echoes the lady’s gesture which keeping balance to the movement of the canvas. On the other side of the wall, appears Matisse’s simplified “Yellow Curtain” in contrast to the noisy “Black Fern” underneath. This is a new picture of an assumptive artist studio with modified arrangement to give a different aspect of Matisse’s inspiration.The actual size of this new painting is 66×48 inches while the original “Odalisque with a Tambourine” is 28 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches. To enlarge a canvas not only stimulates a desire to treat the figure and its surrounding differently but also to integrate another paintings and modify them in accordance with the inner life of a new painting.

Such a research gives pain and joy in doing a post-modern work out of the masterpieces we are familiar to and love so much.

Such process of integrating selectively and creatively some masterpieces into one produces not only a synthetic deja-vu in a fresh light, but also allow you to mingle with the creative life of earlier masters. It’s an exciting experience. In one aspect, it’s an iconoclastic act, sacrifying the old masters to bring “Neo-Iconography” art into existence. Such kind of modern to modern-post to post-modern procedure paves the way to an aspect of computer art where new images are made by combining and composing already-existed different images and this is why Chen’s Neo-Iconography, initiated in 1969, is regarded as the avant-garde of Post-Modernism and of computer art.

– T. F. and Julie Chen