Last week at MoMA I saw some of Giorgio de Chiricho paintings. Many art experts have studied and argued of his painting styles that border between surrealist and abstract arts. I have always liked his works because of their immediate emotional impact created by the exaggerated perspective, intense shadows, and a mood-draping color palette. One that I saw in New York is The Melancholy of Departure. That painting fits exactly into I was trying to say in the previous blog about the state of feeling in farewells.
The key feature in the painting is also the smallest element: two figures walking down a perspectively stretched road. You can barely hear the loud and noisy train in the back, but it is there. The structure of the station is elongated in all three directions. One item that perplexes everyone is the still-life banana in the foreground. It is a technique that de Chiricho used to further play the game of scale and contrast. Not everyone can comprehend the size of sky, a locomotive, or a station. But everyone knows more or less the size of a banana. With all these effects working together in the painting, it creates a sense of intense aural and emotional isolations of the two figures from the surroundings but at the same time exaggerates the closeness of them together. That is the state of feeling when you are saying goodbye to a good friend, that is … the melancholy of departure.
The key feature in the painting is also the smallest element: two figures walking down a perspectively stretched road. You can barely hear the loud and noisy train in the back, but it is there. The structure of the station is elongated in all three directions. One item that perplexes everyone is the still-life banana in the foreground. It is a technique that de Chiricho used to further play the game of scale and contrast. Not everyone can comprehend the size of sky, a locomotive, or a station. But everyone knows more or less the size of a banana. With all these effects working together in the painting, it creates a sense of intense aural and emotional isolations of the two figures from the surroundings but at the same time exaggerates the closeness of them together. That is the state of feeling when you are saying goodbye to a good friend, that is … the melancholy of departure.