BY JUANURREA
• Artist is someone who lives in poverty for a short-lived celebrity, said someone at a dinner bullying Paul.
• his friend Emili Zoila told him: You are cruel Paul, that is why you will never be a great artist.
• Henri Matisse said that “Paul was a God of painting”.
• Pablo Picasso said “Paul was our father”.
This is Paul Cezanne.
Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839-Ib., October 22, 1906) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, considered the father of modern painting and whose works established the bases of the transition between artistic conception nineteenth century towards the artistic world of the twentieth century, new and different. However, while he lived, Cézanne was an ignored painter who worked in great isolation. He mistrusted critics, he had few friends and until 1895 he exhibited only occasionally. He was a «painter's painter», 1 ignored by critics and the public, being appreciated only by some Impressionists and at the end of his life by the new generation. TAKEN FROM WIKPEDIA Both the life and the work of Paul Cézanne can tell us a lot about him, but one does not explain the other, they coexist, intersect, complement each other... His vocation as an artist was marked by his inexhaustible search for painting, which he exercised with extreme dedication and mastery. An enormous effort and a philosophical doubt were reflected in his work. Still, he doubted his own calling. Some contemporaries made fun of him. He was not accepted at the Salon de Paris from 1864 to 1869, and in turn at the Salon des Rejected, he was frustrated at being doubly rejected. But let's focus on his work and not on his complicated personality. Art history defines his work as influenced by Delacroix, Courbet and the Impressionists. His first pictures are painted dreams. They are born from feelings and seek to provoke those who see them only feelings. But he broke away from the Impressionists. Impressionism seeks to show in its paintings how objects affect our perception of them, that is, how objects impress our senses. In the palette chosen by Cézanne there are no longer seven colors, but eighteen: six reds, five yellows, three blues, three greens and one black. Cézanne seeks to represent the object. So he eliminates the contours and prioritizes color over drawing, he sought to capture reality, but without neglecting sensations. Cézanne did not believe that he had to choose between sensation and thought. Sensibility and reason come together in his paintings. He wants to confront science with nature, because the sciences proceed from it. He paints matter as it becomes form, an order that is spontaneously perceived between feeling and thinking. Through composition, he achieves the impression of an order that is born, an object that is going to appear, that is formed in our gaze. And contrary to normal, the drawing is a result of color in permanent vibration. The drawing and the color are confused, you paint while you draw, you draw while you paint. When the color reaches its full potential then the form is born. The arrangement of color encloses an indivisible whole, without the painting becoming anything more than an allusion to things. But an integral unit that defines what reality is for us. When Cézanne grasped appearance only when it emerged from color, he did not distinguish between soul and body, between thought and vision. He shows us an inseparable whole, a primordial experience.
It is true, then, that the life of an author teaches us nothing and also that if we knew how to read it, we would find everything in it. since it is open on the work. Just as we observe the movements of some unknown animal without understanding the law that inhabits and governs them. Cézanne's witnesses do not guess the transmutations that he imposes on events and experiences; they are blind to its meaning, to that radiance from nowhere that at times envelops it. But he himself is never at the center of himself; on nine days out of ten. He sees around him only the misery of his empirical life and his failed essays, remnants of an unknown party. But he always has to realize his freedom in the world, on a canvas, with colors. He has to wait for proof of his worth from others. For this reason he questions each painting that is born from his hand, he spies the gazes of others who contemplate
the fabric of it. For this reason he never finished working. We never separate ourselves from our life, we never see the idea and freedom face to face.
Cezanne's Doubt, Maurice Merleau - Ponty.
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