Summary
Dominique Pagani takes up painting mainly in the 2019 cycle "Nature or Landscape?". There he has three paintings read side by side: Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon1. They set the daytime, ordered nature of classicism, with the human figure at the centre, against the nocturnal, wild and uninhabited nature of Romanticism. The break of the French Revolution falls between the two. Drawing on Hegel's aesthetics, he holds that painting is abstract by essence, since it abstracts from depth. It stands at the edge of music in the gradual interiorisation of the arts. He also traces how the figurative fades from Poussin to Rimbaud, and puts forward the hypothesis of an object that comes apart from Impressionism through to abstraction. Earlier, working on Nerval, he links Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera, the ponds of the Oise and the Breton snow that Gauguin paints in Tahiti: there, landscape is a surface on which the subject projects its fantasies2. In 2023 he uses Goya's painting of time devouring its children to picture the contradiction within the subject3.
- 1#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019
- 2#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Jan 2018
- 3“I is another”, or contradictory identity12 Dec 2023
Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 5 videos
Cycle 12“I is another”, or contradictory identity
12 Dec 2023How can we think the contradiction within the subject, the negativity immanent to the self, and why do we repress it?
Cycle 5.2#5.5 Nature or landscape?
26 Mar 2019How does landscape reach its highest poetic value when the visible setting fades to become an interior landscape?
Cycle 5.2#5.4 Nature or landscape?
4 Feb 2019Are nature and landscape the same thing, or is landscape merely a surface onto which the subject projects its fantasies?
Cycle 5.2#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?
25 Jan 2019Are nature and landscape interchangeable terms?
Cycle 4#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)
15 Jan 2018What does the comparison of Angélique and Aurélia reveal about the evaporation of the real into surface, about the notion of edge in Nerval, and about the possibility of a determinism of human affairs?