6 months ago
A collaborative-style painting in the fusion of Joos de Momper and Max Ernst. A lone man stands in the foreground atop a craggy precipice, facing the viewer. His posture is poised, contemplative — he is moments away from stepping off into the air to join a procession of distant figures drifting serenely on a cloud that floats past. The sky is vast and strange: De Momper’s sweeping, mountainous vistas dissolve upward into Max Ernst’s textured, dreamlike heavens. In the distance, on other clouds at varying altitudes, more human figures are visible — some kneeling, others with arms outstretched — each imploring the radiant, unblinking sun high above to accept them into a distant, glowing realm known as the ‘otherworld’. The atmosphere is charged with longing and transcendence, mixing northern Renaissance clarity with surreal, subconscious symbolism. Colors are muted earth tones below, with ethereal pastel hues in the skies above
