Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, September 1973

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, September 1982

Flowers for eyes, a horizon for a mouth… a popsicle for a holy relic? Rafael Silveira has long been interested in what he describes as “visual synonymies,” which he likens to “formal correspondences between seemingly unrelated things, moments in which one image unexpectedly recognizes itself in another.” The Brazilian artist’s surreal paintings replace facial features with landforms, flora, and fauna, sometimes hybridizing animals, figures, and other objects.

The works seen here were recently included in the artist’s solo exhibition Popsicledelic Trip at KP Projects Gallery in Los Angeles alongside a show by Silveira’s wife, the artist Flávia Itiberê. A series of vertical pieces with ornate, hand-carved wooden frames resemble the silhouette of popsicles, while figures hold giant versions of the frozen treats in a stylistic nod to religious art during the Renaissance.

The popsicle may seem like a quirky, even out-of-place reference within the context of these works, but for Silveira, the objects represent the broader idea that everything in the universe is connected. No matter how absurd it may seem at first glance—a man with a tree for a head or ice cream cones floating planet-like in a starry sky—the point is that they all really do exist simultaneously. Silveira juxtaposes objects and organisms in unlikely scenarios to challenge how we perceive the world around us and how even the same shape can have completely different associations.

One compositional form in particular, the tavola centinata, describes the shape of a canvas or relief with a squared base and rounded top. A feature commonly found in Gothic and early Renaissance paintings, it has the same silhouette as a classic popsicle. In a statement, Silveira says:

The connection is at once surprising and inevitable. One belongs to the sacred history of painting; the other to the realm of the ephemeral, the popular, the sweet, the melting. Bringing them together creates a bridge between devotional form and unstable matter, between permanence and disappearance, between the spiritual weight of the altarpiece and the fragile delight of something destined to dissolve.

See more of the artist’s work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Psychedelic Paintings by Rafael Silveira Explore a World of ‘Visual Synonymies’ appeared first on Colossal.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Marking a century since the Dutch artist stowed away to New York, this vast retrospective gloriously showcases the abstract expressionist’s fierce boundary-pushing

Willem de Kooning was the last great artist who really knew how to draw. More precisely, if less provocatively, he was the last truly transformative painter to have been schooled in the academic tradition that produces what is still recognised, by most people, as “good drawing”. Accurate in the sense of a photograph but, like a filter on your cameraphone, also subtly tidying up the world to meet the ideals of classical proportion. “Draw what you see and not what you think,” the young De Kooning was told. Raw personal emotion had no place – a far cry from what this master of abstract expressionism was to become.

The intense labour required to build a connection between eye, brain and hand so quick as to be instinctive is illustrated by the charcoal still life Dish With Jugs. Made when De Kooning was in his mid-teens, and so minutely rendered that you might mistake it for a sepia photograph, the catalogue estimates that it took 600 hours at the Rotterdam academy to complete. The aim of this exercise was not to produce a single picture so much as to ingrain a way of seeing and reconstructing the world to the point that it becomes inescapable.

RIYAD (ANP/AFP/RTR) - De Jemenitische Houthi's zeggen de internationale luchthaven in Riyad te hebben aangevallen met een ballistische raket. De raket heeft volgens de groep het doel geraakt. Saudi-Arabië zei eerder twee raketten te hebben onderschept.

De Saudische civiele bescherming meldt dat een kleuterschool en een medisch complex beschadigd raakten door brokstukken van de twee onderschepte projectielen. Er waren meerdere explosies te horen in of rond de Saudische hoofdstad.

Een ooggetuige en drie bronnen zeiden tegen persbureau Reuters dat er rook uit een stilstaand vliegtuig kwam op de luchthaven van Riyad. Die roept passagiers op contact op te nemen met luchtvaartmaatschappijen om hun vluchtstatus te controleren voordat ze naar het vliegveld komen.

De aanvallen vinden plaats te midden van gevechten tussen de door Saudi-Arabië gesteunde Jemenitische regeringstroepen en de door Iran gesteunde Houthi's.

Late in his life, the prominent English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was subject to an attempt in the early 1960s by Oswald Mosley to provoke him into a debate about the merits of fascism. Before WWII, Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists. BUF had a corps of paramilitary personnel, nicknamed “Blackshirts” for their uniform color, at its disposal and Mosley “publicly espoused antisemitism and sought alliances with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler”.¹ After the war and having left Britain in disgrace, he was an early Holocaust denier. From Wikipedia:

Mosley was a pioneer in the emergence of Holocaust-denial. While not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps, he claimed that they were a necessity to hold “a considerable disaffected population”, where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to “incessant bombing” by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people. He sought to discredit pictures taken in places like Buchenwald and Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it.

With all that as context, Russell wrote a letter to Oswald in January 1962 emphatically declining his invitation to engage in discourse about fascism:

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

That’s how it’s done.

1. Fascists and authoritarians are often personally shitty as well. “During his marriage to Cynthia, Mosley engaged in an extended affair with his wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, while also carrying on a separate affair with their stepmother Grace, who had been a widow since her husband’s death in 1925.” During his marriages, Mosley apparently also slept with the wives of friends, another of his first wife’s sisters, and several other women. ↩

Tags: Bertrand Russell · fascism · Oswald Mosley · politics

Wij weten niet hoe het met u zit, maar wij zijn ontzettende fan van het politieke handwerk. Dat je bijvoorbeeld door herprioritering van bestaande beleidsvoornemens binnen de niet-juridisch verplichte, beleidsmatig gereserveerde middelen van artikel 4 van de begroting voor Koninkrijksrelaties en het BES-fonds 200.000 euro vrij wilt maken voor een UNICEF-project, schitterend, daar kunt u ons midden in de nacht voor wakker maken, voor een stevig potje herprioriteren van bestaande beleidsvoornemens. Groot was dan ook onze verbazing toen CDA-Kamerlid Tijs 'piemel' Van den Brink gisteravond tijdens het debat over de begroting voor Koninkrijksrelaties aan Heera Dijk van D66 vroeg waar zij de dekking voor haar amendement op die begroting vandaan haalde. Dat staat immers gewoon in de tekst, het is namelijk door herprioritering van bestaande beleidsvoornemens binnen de niet-juridisch verplichte, beleidsmatig gereserveerde middelen van artikel 4. Kan Tijs van den Brink niet lezen ofzo? Dat is toch appeltje eitje voor een beetje politieke handwerker? Maar kennelijk is het niet alleen te ingewikkeld voor Van den Brink, maar ook voor Heera Dijk zelf, die dus niet voor de bril had dat de dekking gevonden is door herprioritering van bestaande beleidsvoornemens binnen de niet-juridisch verplichte, beleidsmatig gereserveerde middelen van artikel 4. Dat krijg je dus met al die door AI bedachte content. Dan weten de mensen niet meer wat ze zelf nou eigenlijk staan te verkondigen. We zagen het bij D66-Kamerlid Hanneke van der Werf, bij D66-Kamerlid Hanneke van der Werf en nu dus bij Heera Dijk. Misschien is het bij onderwijspartij D66 tijd een herprioritering van de vaardigheden van Tweede Kamerleden. Of past dat niet bij de bestaande beleidsvoornemens?

Ontwapenende eerlijkheid, wel