The Philosopher’s Conquest
Giorgio de Chirico
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, 1914. OIL ON CANVAS.
Ten years before Dalí put dreams to canvas or Magritté created works of visual and intellectual illusion, the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico was painting definitively surrealist works. His art combines classicism with the avant-garde, creating paintings that at first glance could be read as naïve landscapes or simple still lives but on further inspection become disturbing and disquieting compositions of implausible juxtaposition. Here, time and space themselves subtly warp; the clock reads 1:30, but the shadows are long as if late or early in the day. A steam train rides by in the background, it’s shape proportionate to the foreground but it is dwarfed by two pillars behind it, throwing our perspective and sense of scale into disarray. Two cannonballs emerge from the corner, and seem to be balanced perfectly atop each other with no sense of precariousness. Yet all of these oddities dwarf under the most surreal element of all - the combination of objects. This is a palazzo of dreams, populated with incongruous matter that create a connection to the subconscious, but fail to make any rational sense together.