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La Novia que se Espanta de Ver la Vida Abierta / 1943 Few if any painters aside from Cezanne, particularly in his depiction of fruit offered humankind a better empirical comprehension about the workings of visual perception in its relationship to the effects of time on matter. If Cezanne's work is about the nature of perception, then Kahlo's work is about the experience of sensation. No sensation exists without a perception of it and inversely no perception exists without producing a sensation as a result of its operation, albeit sometimes as subtle as a blink. Studying both masters warmly hands over to anyone with the passion to elucidate the elusive mystery of human consciousness the auto-generating hermaphroditic Siamese Twin Sensoriperception that gave birth to experience, then intellect. Kahlo's genius in depicting sensation is, without question, at its sharpest when she is examining pain. Kahlo's best-crafted allegorical images are vivid signposts in a barrio of the world spirit that has a historical as well as mythological basis, the archetypal land of the tortured or suffering artist. There is no better cartographer for the area of the collective unconscious that this archetype inhabits than Frida Kahlo, and no one before or since has done so even remotely close to as comprehensively. Even though this angle on suffering before Kahlo was relative terra incognita, depiction of suffering certainly was not. It was a standard and almost mandatory requisite for an artist to render an interpretation of the crucifixion for his portfolio; of course, there are notable exceptions, such as Da Vinci, whose mother many art historians hypothesize was a Jewish slave. Even into the twentieth century, many painters continue to depict the crucifixion, even artists as unlikely to do so as Francis Bacon and Barnett Newman. The mental and physical agony of crucifixion is as rarefied as it is specific to a particular experience of pain.The painterly...»» Quebec Self-Portrait with a Collar of Thorns

F L A S H B A C K

	March 2003