Vienna's MUMOK is my favourite art museum, so much so that I have an annual membership card. On my last visit Pignon's Cock Fight and Dominguez's Motor Cyclist caught my eye. The photos show detail from each. The works, both from the 1950's are not dissimilar in style and final effect. The motorcyclist has become as he imagines himself, invisible and at one with the roar and violence of the machine. I was struck by the machine's unforgiving architecture; the whirr of steel discs and the bullish horns of the forks. The violence of the cock fight also has a quality that draws the viewer into the scene. You can sense the thrill of the kill, something that the owners of these fighting cocks greatly enjoy. Exhilaration, violence and risk are present in both of these excellent paintings.
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| Cock Fight - Edouard Pignon (1959) |
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| The Motorcyclist - Oscar Dominguez (1957) |
Not really my kind of pictures Gwil - sorry.
ReplyDeleteThanks Pat. I think I put them up as they fit to the times we live in. There's so much aggression around at the moment, particularly here in the East of Europe. People who feel they have been led down the garden path by the centre-left in Austria are beginning to lose patience. There's an eerie sense that the centre cannot hold.
DeleteThe first one brings back memories of my bedroom curtains when I was a child. Not that they had anything whatsoever to do with cockfighting. The pattern was in fact leaves. I used to invent all kinds of images and stories around these leaves and they would easily turn into something else in front of my eyes, and I could continue the story where I left off when I next went to bed. We can all interpret images in our own way.
ReplyDeleteThat's art. And "We can all interpret images in our own way." For example I don't see the wonder of the Mona Lisa as others describe it. I've tried, but I just can't get it.
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