Aziz Art August 2018

Style
In the paintings of his
metaphysical period, de Chirico
developed a repertoire of
motifs—empty arcades, towers,
elongated shadows, mannequins,
and trains among others—that he
arranged to create "images of
forlornness and emptiness" that
paradoxically also convey a feeling
of "power and freedom
".According to Sanford
Schwartz, de Chirico—whose
father was a railroad engineer—
painted images that suggest "the
way you take in buildings and
vistas from the perspective of a
train window. His towers, walls,
and plazas seem to flash by, and
you are made to feel the power
that comes from seeing things
that way: you feel you know them
more intimately than the people
do who live with them day by day."
In 1982, Robert Hughes wrote
that de Chirico
could condense voluminous feeling
through metaphor
and association ... In The Joy of
Return, 1915, de Chirico's train has
once more entered the city ... a
bright ball of vapor hovers directly
above its smokestack. Perhaps it
comes from the train and is near
us. Or possibly it is a cloud on the
horizon, lit by the sun that never
penetrates the buildings, in the last
electric blue silence of dusk. It
contracts the near and the far,
enchanting one's sense of space.
Early de Chiricos are full of such
effects. Et quid amabo nisi quod
aenigma est? ("What shall I love if
not the enigma?")—this question,
inscribed by the young artist on his
self-portrait in 1911, is their
subtext.
In this, he resembles his more
representational American
contemporary, Edward Hopper:
their pictures' low sunlight, their
deep and often irrational shadows,
their empty walkways and
portentous silences creating an
enigmatic visual poetry.