Christian Simonian
7 Art Mini Critiques
By Don Pesavento
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One can only marvel at what wondrous art Pablo Picasso might have created if today’s digital tools were at his disposal. Ithink one of his 21st Century creations may have been something akin to this self-described homage composition by Christian Simonian. It has been opined that the highest form of flattery is imitation, but this piece exists in a faraway realm beyond the boundaries of mere imitation. It is stylistically unique unto itself. The central face is reflected, and their combined
Homage To Picasso
mutated mirror images reveal distorted counter-masks of Comedy and Tragedy. The mask of Comedy is to the left, devoid of eyes (as a removed mask would logically seem) and is characterized by a seemingly smiling open mouth and concave cheeks. This is in opposition to the central visage’s Tragedy frowning mouth and convex cheeks.
For me, this beautifully stirred emotions evoked of the tragic clowns Pagliacci, and Emmett Kelly, and even more pitiable figures such as Victor Hugo’s hunchbacked bell-ringer, Quasimodo. The one-eyed figure’s exaggerated orbital rim and quasi sunny-side-up purple egg gaze (averted away from us to the right) suggests that we follow the focus of that attention. An eye reflection appears at the very right bottom of the digital canvass (reminiscent of Picasso’s visionary dual-eyed portraiture avant-garde incongruities).
No need for the artist to be too humble here. Yes, Picasso is a Titan of 20th Century Modern Art, and yet this work rivals his best. This masterpiece deserves its own title. Quasimodo Follows Esmeralda, or Quasimodo Unrequited (of Notre Dame de Paris fame) alternatively come to mind (somehow, actor Charles Laughton’s fabled cinematic Notre Dame of Paris hunchback’s face got in there, too). Some art traditionalists may denigrate the hard digital image techniques in favor of the softer analog brush tones. Those viewers with a similar mindset may also feel inclined pooh-pooh photography as somehow being inferior to painting. All I can say is look for yourself. Thearresting purple and teal bluesagainst thepeach,particularly the prominentproboscis, is fresh, warms and softens an otherwise somewhat chilled zygoma-bone hardened facies.
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The theatre or Shakespeare atmosphere
My favorite title in all of this artist’s digital-art Corpus. At first, I misread the title as The Theater of Shakespeare, and immediately fell in love with that title. Somehow, it seemed so right. But I’m a sucker for the specific among the vague, and for me, taking the motif one step further, this composition will always be Romeo and Juliet. I neither pretend to deeply understand Shakespeare (although Idid ace a University course on Billy) nor feign to comprehend this wonderful work. No need to. Only to feel the art is paramount; to come away with a sense of its beauty and mystery. Paraphrased Jorge Borges’ description of poetry as the “imminence of a revelation never completely revealed” and seems is apropos here because those words are poignantly true for visual art as well.
The bizarre, polymorphic amoeba pseudopodium-like (foot) figure at the left, although reminiscent of Dali’s melted clocks in The Persistence of Memory, takes on a primordial abstract life of their own. The dual figures Dada-fuse at the bottom as if in parthenogenic-replicating harmony. A simmering Georges Braque cubist-like influence is subliminally present. The left figure appears as a lower leg and foot, complete with a big toe toenail, and what looks like a Māori-like tattoo or stretched-out barcode along its medial aspect. Ribbons of piano keys are prominent along its plantar surface, as well as on the right figure (looking a little like a Native American Indian Chief’s eagle-feathered headdress. Interestingly, a surreal octopus-like cephalopod figure floats within its body.
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Little Big Bang
Cosmic nascency born from the artist's fertile imagination, perhaps the Big Bang of a Higgs Boson (the so-called "God Particle"). It resembles an exploding spacecraft, disintegrating on warp light-speed (as seen juxtaposed against the peripheral streaking particles in Space) enhancing the sense of kinetic momentum, overcoming inertia. Thus, one more readily perceives the expanding nature of the Universe. My favorite aspect is the Neptune-green wing-like Space-ether seen to the right of the Freudian psychoanalytic introitus abstraction, subliminally gonadal-priapic symbolism-suggestive of the central sphere, opening as if giving birth to the Universe. The Green Genie’s Fairy daughter is out of the Absinthe bottle.
My Occidental sensibilities sometimes have difficulty wrapping my mind around all things Oriental. The artist Christian Simonian is obviously French, and clearly created this wondrous digital composition with a characteristic French flare. And yet it simultaneously exudes enigmatic Far Eastern undercurrents. A premier example is the Chinese concept of Yin Yang. I think of it as two separate entities, i.e. Yin and Yang, but apparently Asians perceive it as One continuum entity comprised of dualities: light/dark, positive/negative, good/evil, male/female, etc. How even more wondrous it is then, to see this artist’sexpansive vision of the birth of the Universe in both Western and Eastern abstract-androgynous terms.
Red Clouds
Christian Simonian’s visually sumptuous, sinuous surreal-swirling sanguineous plasma seascape. The cirsoid “S” shaped river begins at the furthermost-left midpoint of the digital canvass (rendered in thick black) and meanders inwardly, metamorphosing into an estuary that eventually empties into a delta (at the right-most midpoint side of the frame). An exclamatory Sacre Bleu comes to mind; Poet Samuel Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan’s Xanadu:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. Alternatively, the image becomes a wind-swept Red Planet distorted sandscape, wavy-reminiscent of the artist’s rippled desert-like Line Movement 1,2 and 3 series. At one point, I felt like a psychic spelunker, squeezing my impressions between dreamscape-cavern crevices of the imagination. In the words of K.C and The Sunshine Band “That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it, uh huh, uh huh.”
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Trumpet Jazz Sound 03
Trumpet-tintinnabulum echoing poet Federico Lorca's description of the "black sound" defining duende, here we appreciate the artist's abstract impressionistic gray-scale silver toned chiaroscuro of trumpet jazz sound (#3). Jazz trumpeter-extraordinaire Miles Davis’s nickname was The Prince of Darkness, and so, how appropriate it seems, to have this trumpet thematically rendered in seminal black and white “timbres”.
The perspective seems to be from looking directly down into the trumpet's wide aperture with buttons noted at top ("note" pun intended). The concaved figure at the right, appears almost hollowed-out bone, conjuring up the steer-femur flutes created and used by that astonishing Native American Navajo/Ute flutist, Carlos Nikai. The synesthetic oxymoron "silver notes" come to mind. Yes, jazzy jazz it is, jazzed-up and supremely trumpet-triumphant.
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Bleu Square
Resplendent and pristine-clean ultra-blue pool stick cue rosin-rouged portal inviting us to snorkel within its hypnotic exotic blue grotto sea. Its impenetrable square window is rendered all the more mysterious by thedeftlayeringofdiaphanous violets andmauves, particularlythe2triangles at the frame’s left, and lighter blue and pale lavender intersecting triangles at the top. These multiple shades simultaneously accentuate our focus onto the astonishing blue square, center-stage inviting our gaze. Staring directly at the blue square, an illusion appears: barely perceptible, phantom squares fading traces of blue shades within its blue. Unlike the artist’s Black Hole which appears 3 dimensional, this piece seems 2 dimensional, and yet somehow magically conjures up a z-plane legerdemain within its surreal Zen quadrilateral bull’s eye. Sacre bleu vérité, Indeed
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Eagle with Two Heads
Powerfully captivating, beautiful chimera-surreal aquiline anomaly displaying two heads with their rostral-pointed beaks, profiles facing right. The left and lower portions of the figure feather-proliferate along the serrated borders of the entangled dark wings in a dazzling reflectivity shadow-rendered onto the quasi-Dali-esque desert-scape ochre browns on which it sits. But unlike Dali's Invention of the Monsters, in which a fiery giraffe burns in the distance, this eagle imagery presents itself up close while becoming even more distant-mysterious. The eagle's talons materialize just to the right of the blue crescent boomerang and aesthetically reflecting a robin’s egg shell.
