The Arrival
Giorgio de Chirico
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, 1913. OIL ON CANVAS.
Everyday reality crashes into surrealist mythology as perspectives warp and time flattens into a single, unknowable, unplaceable landscape. After a revelation in a Florence piazza, De Chicoro began to paint obsessively, trying to capture the uncanny feelings that could not be translated into anything but painting, allowing for his personal sensitivity to the strangeness of the human environment to create metaphysical works. The works are paradoxical, evoking a feeling of nostalgia as well as novelty, empty, forlorn and hopeless they nonetheless convey a sense of power and freedom. De Chirico condensed the enormity of feeling, the bombardment of daily life into metaphor – inspired by the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, he tried to capture the ominous existence beneath the surface of writing in oil paint. Predating the surrealists, his work established a foundation for warped perspective of existence to speak more truthfully than any attempts at representation ever could.