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| Ophélia, 1963
<http://www.leonor-fini.com/accueil/peintures/annees-60.html>
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For this week's Surrealist exploration, I gravitated to the work of Leonor Fini, marginalized female painter and self-professed cat lover. Her affinity for felines and fashion design made us kindred spirits; her ability to transcend reason in her creations through sensuality and feminine forms made me a fan. Most of Fini's work I have viewed certainly reveres the female body--its fluidity and power palpable in all her mediums. There is also a hallucinatory essence to many of Fini's bodily forms, and a recent news article affirmed my sensibility: "[Fini] claimed that her dreams were the main source of her strange and irrational imagery, which often involved women playing weirdly erotic games without men...[and] she asserts the enduring power of the feminine" (Kent). I question the author's use of the word "weirdly" as it seems to demonstrate a Protestant-like qualifier to distance oneself from first-hand knowledge of anything potentially salacious, but I do accept the entrée of "erotic" in relation to Fini's work. I cannot say that all of her work connotes an eroticism (her earlier work in the 1920's and 30's does not quite seem there yet), but as a whole her oeuvre does embody a suggestiveness of something beyond the visual, something to be felt and subsumed by.
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| La Toilette Inutile, 1964 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6467290/Leonor-Fini-surreal-thing.html> |
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| Asphodèle, 1965
<http://www.leonor-fini.com/accueil/peintures/annees-60.html>
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Panning through Fini's work, I was compelled to focus on her work from the 1960's, particularly the oil paintings I have displayed here: Ophélia, La Toilette Inutile, and Asphodèle. It was their similarities that I found most provocative; the repetitive image of the completely reposed body that has abandoned itself to a nirvana-
like plane speaks to an awareness of the unconscious, that space where reason does sleep. Fini's Ophélia hearkens to the tragic Shakespearean Ophelia, her dead, pale body floating horizontal in the brook, encumbered and weighted down by a dress, yet the dark and cool tones of this painting metamorphose into a palate of warmth in La Toilette Inutile. The facial features come into high relief here and the feminine body seems to lift from that horizontal plane, radiating from within while the dress (La Toilette Inutile, the useless dress) appears to be consumed by flames. The triumph comes in Asphodèle where the bodily form is now vertical and has shed itself of any dress, its nakedness glows and embraces the swirling residues of its transmogrification. The title Asphodèle affirms the death of the dress by alluding to the herbaceous asphodelus, a plant often used in reference to the underworld in Greek mythology. Further, there is an acceptance of nature in the title in that the worldly confines of dress and identity through dress must be shed in order to return to a pre-Ideal-I state, the place before language and where only sensory is known.
Although Fini created these paintings over a span of three years, I find it hard not to think that the triad is a movement towards something, an understanding of how language functions, a work of identity in progress, a reclamation of the feminine form, and a subtle yet powerful middle finger to the Surrealist male status quo. Instead of seeing Fini's work as periphery to a movement, affronted by artists like Dali ("[Fini is] Better than most, perhaps. But talent is in the balls" (qtd. in Kent)), images like these should be felt, intuited, and appreciated for attending to the other than visual elements of being human through--paradoxically--a visual medium.
Works Cited
Kent, Sarah. "Leonor Fini: surreal thing." The Telegraph. 30 Oct. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6467290/Leonor-Fini-surreal-thing.html>
"Leonor Fini." Minsky Gallery. 2010. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. <http://www.leonor-fini.com/en/home/minsky-gallery.html> |
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