Art
Gaon is most famous for his Time Square series (1998) displaying the chaos and confusion of city. His depictions of the locale have been called dizzying, disorienting, and even mind-boggling. His works manifest the vitality, wildness, drivenness, and hysterical quality of the urban setting, ever expanding to the point of explosion. Gaon's chaotic Time Square, helps him, as an artist, express the contradictory life forces that live within him.
Gaon also focuses on those who live on the urban periphery, the street people, immigrants, and prostitutes. His paintings go beyond the immediate perception of these subjects, to uncover the inherent contradictions both in his subjects psyche and social position, and in his own consciousness. His subjects display a noble and prophetic character, as if spiritually from a bygone era yet awkwardly entrenched in a harsh contemporary reality.
Read more about this topic: Simon Gaon
Famous quotes containing the word art:
“Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has “cast up” in my time or is like to—this art by which even the “poor” can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?”
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“In the final analysis, “style” is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)