Dreaming away Painting

Being in a melancholic state was appreciated by all, from Albrecht Dürer to Lars von Trier, both as a condition of having a broken spirit, a depression and as a complete self-immersion, as being detached from the outside world and having reached a turning point of the internal stress, a point after which one gets liberated from any negativity and experiences enlightenment and creative insight. The state of a melancholic drama was characteristic for the aesthetics of the early German Expressionist cinema. Films of the period have as their recurrent theme the idea of Shadow being an otherworldly adversary and a double of the hero that inhabits his internal world, both distorting his perception of the objective outside world and controlling his behavior. Those films can be seen as a further development of the aesthetics of Romanticism and psychological post-Romanticism. Striving to express the melancholic drama of the post-Romantic emotional experience, Xenia uses here a contrast between a delicate color scheme and energetic brush strokes; fine gradations of pearl-gray strokes clash with deliberate, overtly expressive, decorative color dabs in the lower part of the painting evoking associations with prosaic pieces by Théophile Gautier, Alexander Chayanov, or Edgar Allan Poe. Uneven lines defining the figure symbolize the delicate boundary of a state when a person existing in such a melancholic and depressed condition may either dissolve in the vortex of internal drama and despair or overcome this moment of stress and commit an act of creative re-birth. An indication of such a possibility is shown by the Shadow behind the figure; it has a bizarre outline looking a bit like a bird; and here we must think of Akh, which in Egyptian religion was the otherworldly incarnation of a person’s pure, “radiant” soul (its master being Merimutef, one of the patron gods of the dead): in the Egyptian figurative system Akh was depicted as the ibis hieroglyph. It is also interesting to note that Akh was regarded as Shadow in Ancient Egypt, which is a kind of an equivalent of today’s concept of a ghost. And Merimutef, Akh’s patron in the afterworld, was at times depicted as a being with a falcon’s head. Aiming to capture this duality of real and irreal, Xenia uses Art Nouveau’s techniques, a style characterized by oversensitive, sophisticated beauty, by the aesthetics of Symbolism with its concept of the world’s dual nature. The degree of the nervous strain is indicated by such minor details as pointed dabs of a paintbrush which can be seen to the left of the figure. The melancholic drama appears here as a condition of an exceptionally deep self-immersion which is necessary in order to attain a new level of personal growth—and this is a thought-provoking challenge for spectators.