WHEN PAINTING BECAME COLORED FACES SHOW – The many faces of James Ensor

JAMES ENSOR 1/6 – The man who is born in the spring and dies in the autumn, the painter who at age 21 he created his first solo exhibition. A creative experience (still lifes, portraits, interiors bourgeois melancholy, landscapes), who was born with dark period, where the colors are deep and dark, with light that vibrates under the influence of Flemish naturalism. JAMES ENSOR 2/6 – Everything changes when he approaches the Symbolism, anticipating the era of Expressionism. His surreal reality is based on a language of harsh colors, with broken brushstrokes, which increase the violent impact of what he represents. For him, the masks are faces and people, where he painted at the center of humanity strange (even scary, masked, which does not have the courage to show his true colors). JAMES ENSOR 3/6 – Every painting is a show of colors, faces with strange expressions. The faces encased in his paintings are many: Women with overly large mouths, monsters, skulls, faces enormous and almost animalistic. Its colors are bright and garish, almost to represent a party of strange guests. JAMES ENSOR 4/6 – In a self-portrait, the only serious face is his, as he looks around, looking for what is authentic, among the many faces around him. His pictorial creativity is characterized by satirical, bitter and irreverent, with a Symbolism fantastic opening his world view, what will be known as Expressionism. JAMES ENSOR 5/6 – As Munch and Gauguin, his work is full of tension hallucinatory, an emotional nuance almost impossible to represent the colors, but he creates his world ironic and surreal, in the synthesis of expressionist impulses and ramblings of the imagination. JAMES ENSOR 6/6 – His metaphor of existence, mocking satire of bourgeois society, is made with shades of color that are paraphrases of absurdity, with faces that give extreme emphasis on the ambiguity of the human condition, suspended between our darkest inner fears.                 You can see more on Meeting Benches, looking for: JAMES ENSOR (1860/1949), BELIAN PAINTER– The language of harsh colors, under the influence of Flemish naturalism