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:
“Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)