Pyramide Vivante

#73006     29 X 42″      mmp

• Boticelli: “Spring”, ca. 1477-78. Uffizi, Florence
• Picasso: “Head of a Young Girl”, 1948-50. Private collection, Turin, Italy

Without presuming to characterize ancient Egyptian religion, Chen stages a nighttime festival of death inside the Pyramid of Khufu, while the nearby Sphynx stands guard. The columnar stripes within the pyramid suggest ancient Rome and Roman law, and the rhythmical figures are from Renaissance, when Egyptian and Roman civilizations were part of a cultural fusion. For all their Botticellian origin, however, the dancing girls are appropriately grim. It is as if a wrong accent on the rhythm of a chant or a misdirected body movement would bring down Osiris’s wrath and throw them to a second death of extinction.If Picasso is sometimes difficult to decipher, a Picasso Sphynx is doubly enigmatic. We are accustomed to being stumped by that massive ancient figure, whether garbed a la Picasso or not. It no longer frightens us. In the lower right, the two small figures of camels turned into operating gallows are infinitely more disturbing. A penalty for those graces who fail the dance of death? Or Middle Eastern apocalyptic talismen?

-Lawrance Jeppson