painting, oil, blue, paraphrases, figurative, human, Ortega, YGasset, massman, daVinci
Description:
The primary motivation for my project was to process my experiences during a semester in Split. In my paintings I portrayed a world that I could not have told in any other ways but through pictoral expression. During my studies in Croatia, I found paraphrases while exploring how people relate to nature around them. I saw scenes in real life that could be interpreted as paraphrases of a particular historical pre-image or topos, such as Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer over the Sea of Fog, or the iconographic type of the "Three Graces", etc. As reality twists the original meaning of these works, it points to the type of man analysed by José Ortega y Gasset in his book The Revolt of the Masses, the „Mass man”. A type of man who simply exists, but is rootless. Therefore he has no past and no future, and is drifting through an empty present. The concept and characterisation of the mass man The concept of the mass man is not a quantitative but a qualitative definition. It is not a social class, but a type of person/lifestyle that appears in all kinds of social groups. "One can determine whether a person is a mass or not." It means a person who is not different from his fellows but embodies a general type. One of its main characteristics is emptiness. He can be anything, since he has no immutable self. Since he has only desires but no purpose, he drifts through life, and therefore does not believe in individual quests. If circumstances do not force him, he turns to no one, he is content with himself. Moreover, he is "mentally closed". This does not mean that he is a fool: his abilities, vital powers, and technical means are greater and more abundant than those of men of previous ages, but he uses all these to avoid using his wits. He asserts and proclaims the right to vulgarity. He listens to no one, and it does not even occur to him that there is anyone above him in merit. He has not experienced his limitations, so he forces his own personality onto the other person. He is rootless, for he is not bound to any historical past. Thus, he is just floating in the present. He seeks to eliminate individuality, which is why society is becoming increasingly homogeneous. Although he has the means of controlling the course of civilisation, he cannot do so due to his ignorance. „we live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world to-day goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts.” (Gasset, José Ortega Y: The revolt of the masses. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1932, 47.page)
Adoration of the Magi (Leonardo da Vinci)
Júlia SzilágyiYear: 2024
Size: 75 x 94 cm
Technique: pastel on paper
Price: n.a.