The Representation of Beauty, Silence, Sound and Loneliness If Baruch Spinoza said Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia,

, quam rara sunt we can affirm that Christian Furr is a great painter that uses Newtons optical theories suggesting subjective analysis, states of mind, happiness, warmth and anxiety . The cosmopolitan artist speaks to man, of his joys and fears, of his melancholy and triumphs, of his passions and his disappointments linking his works to Berkeleys idealism in which nothing exists without being perceived. In fact Furr applies this ideology to the human psyche and shows the opinion that humans could find essence in their interdependence and relationships. Like G.M. Hopkins he conveys the idea that each created thing has its own character or instress. So his main aim is to capture this quality depicting images in a further mental development.In the postmodern world where technology, ambition, individualism and chaos sometimes leave one to retreat into self-imposed loneliness introspection, Furrs output often consists of domestic interiors in which one or two figures are shown sitting , playing musical instruments or wrapped up in their thoughts. Like Robert Henri, he underlines the importance of everyday life and in his paintings Sliding Doors, Not for Sale, Red & Black he captures transient moments in the life of people seeking different ways of representing men or women , developing a method by which they are depicted with scientific accuracy and details so that his paintings become like a mirror of the visible world full of metaphors and vivid colours remembering R.Magrittes statement Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we seeIn Furrs painting Sliding Doors the man is sitting with his absent gaze fixed in front of him and he is characterized by solitary quietness and melancholy. He sits stiff and he does not seem take part in the scene becoming a symbol of the subtle melancholic loneliness of modern life. What might he be thinking while sitting on the chair?The answer could be linked to the Theatre of the Absurd and to its main exponents such as Kafka, Beckett, Pinter. Like them he introduces recurrent themes such as the room, silence, solitude or inability to communicate. Magrittes two lovers recall the impossibility to truly communicate that we can also find in T.S. Eliots poems The Waste Land and Woolfs novels.If Camus said The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity , Furr tends to withdraw into ourselves indulging in meditation, confrontation and introspection, individualism or egotism, emphasizing that the inner being is just an incessantly chattering voice, or voices, neither personal nor unique. Words are useless, there is nothing outside language except the silence recalling Novaliss verses The silence is the caustic of soul. Freud hinted that life may be regarded as merely a disease of matter and Furr stresses the theme of monotony and loneliness and

reproduces the mysterious, difficult and incomprehensible life that often closes man on his own silence stressing the fact that the solitude can be experienced most intensely among millions or in the couple remembering E. Montales verses There flows between us an underwater light that distorts the profile of your face...every gesture of yours enters without wake...and I flow into the power that weighs around me, into the spell of no longer recognizing anything of myself It seems that man is in the dilemma of being unable to find any essential purpose to his actions, the dilemma of existentialism, of being confronted with choices in day-to-day living and having to invent purposes and meanings for himself without any metaphysical or intrinsic principles to guide him recalling Sabas verses: Around a solitary greatness...you hear nothing but silence, see nothing but air and Samuel Becketts statement:Nous attendons. Nous nous ennuyons... Passive life is manifested through the characters immobility and the result is a synthesis between the Sartrean existentialism and idealism where humans thrust into a world with no essence.Thus, his paintings assume a universal significance as a symbol both of life, annihilation, hope and dream recalling Emily Dickinsons verses: There is a solitude of space, a solitude of sea.. a soul admitted to itself - Finite Infinity Furrs characters seem to be clever, elegant, bright and self-confident but show thoughtful circular movements. In Not for Sale the womans gaze is penetrating and absent while the man is playing the instrument giving the painting a timeless quality in which sound is a universal dream. They are together but they are alone remembering D.Campanas verses: With your beady feral eyes you gaze of me, are silent, wait, and draw near, gaze again, and are silent, your flesh awkward and heavy sleeps torpidly in primordial dream Perhaps it is the voice of the Western individual that is in a state of collapse and is exhausted. It is important to notice that his work shows an everyday scene, the couple is shown indoors, it is realistic but it is represented in an imaginative atmosphere. In Dalis works the bond between man and woman is troubled by ambivalent feelings of dependence and in Furrs paintings the couples are seen as people whose relationships seem defective or even impossible remembering Catulluss verses: I hate and love. How can I do that, you might ask me perhaps? I do not know. But thats what I feel and this is torture. Thus he could be connected to De Chirico because he describes not

only the external world but also a world infused by dream and feelings combining in a single composition scenes of contemporary life and visions, producing a highly troubling realityIt is therefore through an aesthetic contemplation that Furr juxtaposes reality and dream and in The Girl with the Green Cloth love is a man presented from the back while in Love Forever we remember R.Brownings verses: She looked on, and her looks went everywhere In the romantic Girl with Flute the scene seems remote as if viewed from a distance and as if the objects are recreated in the mind by the recollection of sensations they generate in her with her morbid sensibility, her aesthetic view of the world and her love for a sensuous, musical form recalling G.DAnnunzios verses We are immersed in the spirit of the woodland, alive with arboreal life, and your ecstatic face is soft with rain as a leaf. O earthly creature whose name is Ermione..Light, on the fresh thoughts that our soul discloses, renewed on the lovely fable Even if his portraits and paintings are realistic , he also makes frequent use of symbolism trying to understand this intelligible world recalling Paul Valery who said that si les artistes saddressent lintellect, ils usent en meme temps, des moyens indirects pour attendre lame sensitiveIt is important to notice that Christian Furr has a personal, metaphysical theory of light and like W.Blake he believes that the outer objective world around us is a projection, a shadow of an ideal inner subjective reality. His painting Nativity seems to reflect the world of dreams of the subconscious in which men cannot know the truth, but can try to get at it through symbols created by the artistic imagination remembering Paul Eluards verses:Il dissipe le jour, il montre aux hommes les images dlies del lapparence, il enlve aux hommes la possibilit de se distraire..il confonde lhomme avec sa ralit He follows English examples, from Ruskin to Millet but he brings an aesthetic of nuances and hints into the contemporary painting epitomizing the ideal of Art for Arts Sake keeping the vague or real subjects in order to leave them open to different interpretations and many forms.Moreover, he is linked to impressionistic and in abstract art and his paintings The Emancipation of Dissonance... Pop Swirl How Sweet I Roamd he shows an escape from the industrial world, emotion, fragmentation of reality by juxtapositions and allusive objects. Hence there is also a view of Art as vision which leads to an understanding of the invisible essence. Thus, Christian Furr can be linked to the Symbolist movement because

he exploits ambiguity and the enigmatic recalling Burne-Joness definition of painting: a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be in a light better than any that ever shown in a land no one can define or remember, - only desire and the forms divinely beautiful The flowers are frequently recurrent symbols and can represent spiritual love, beauty, innocence, youth, harmony, artistic creation but also the process of dissolution.Often provided with a surrealistic opening from outside, the room or the bedroom can symbolize a refuge, a sort of motherly womb, a sort of property or a kind of prison for the modern couple, the end of a relationship and sexual atrophy. The sea can represent the unknown, the vase symbolizes the eternity and value of art while the dove is the symbol of the presence of nature, freedom or individualism.In Marble Hill Nude the tree can symbolize fertility while In Love Forever the flowers represent romantic or eternal love remembering Virgils verses Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori. The portrait in Step by Step recalls Robert Brownings verses: Thats my last Duchess printed on the wall, looking as if she were alive, I call that piece a wonder..she looked on, and her looks went everywhere The slender, elegant figures of women in his symbolic painting Flesh and Blood create a perfect frame of volume and colour never indefinite or blurred but sonorous and magnificent.The mirror is the symbol of mans double personality, it could represent social hypocrisy while In Red and Black it idealizes the womans beauty and represents the union of the real and the ideal because she sees the mirror as a reflection of her own soul, as an independent being but she is extraneous to herself and wants to keep eternal youth. In the postmodern world where technology and ambition promote selfreliant individualism more than ever, the landscape behind the window acquires a deep symbolical meaning. In his painting Venus it seems linked to a state of being, to a Surrealistic relationship either open or closed to external world. In the romantic Gates in the mist we see an Impressionistic use of lighter shades of colors and the attempt to see the imaginative ideal in certain place as Ezra Pound called an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time remembering Quasimodos verses: No other hour consoles us but that of silence; and the mutable face of air and hill fails to satisfy, the light rotates its hollow skies at the edge of darkness Furr sees Art as the supreme moment when man, through unconscious intuition, can grasp the truth lying behind reality and he is linked to

Imaginism because he maintains complexity and allusiveness dealing with subjective emotions and individual themes. In Marble Hill Nude there is a living microcosm, a visionary power of spirit in which the landscape is fragmented, suggesting the loss of consciousness; it is like an enchanted dream recalling Marcel Prousts verses: ..et maintenant..il pouvait se trouver dans le seul milieu o il put vivre, jouir de lessence des choses, cest-a-dire en dehors du temps Although concerned with the social and human problems of our time, Christian Furrs Blenheim Palace during GE Triathlon acquires particular emphasis as regards the mystery emphasizing the contrast between the idea of limitation and the infinite that allows the working of imagination, the act of waiting, the unknown remembering G. Leopardis verses : Seated here and lost in an endless meditation...which discovers a vaste space within, boundless silence and deep inner quiet...Like the wind I compare this infinite silence, this inner voice ...and the present lives in that sound . If Wallace Stevens said that The relation of art to life is of the rise importance in a skeptical age since the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, Hurrs imagination can create significance in the modern world in which skepticism has destroyed the absolute values and the mind does not perceive the real meanings. Moreover, he has the great ability of visual analysis showing the modern idea that the background of a painting might be as significant as the foreground establishing a link that is able to capture the immediacy of vision.In the Renaissance landscapes could often be seen in idealized forms in the background of many paintings acquiring symbolic meanings but Hurr forms images celebrating natural life against the artificial society focusing in the elemental forces of nature, the effects of light and the immensity of space. Like Botticelli he has an acute sensibility to colour and great technical ability in depicting the human figure in a linear elegance, His works are both realistic and expressive with the attention to human forms and exploration of human identity. Even if the portraits Lucette, Thomas Huntingdon, Rex, Queen Elizabeth II are inspired by real men or women, he adds his personal touch beginning with the framework of perspective lines and then building up the images through the laws of foreshortening. In his painting Venus the atmosphere of great intimacy is conveyed by the Rossettian aesthetic perception of the nude who represents the femme fatale surrounded by a sensual atmosphere remembering G.Ungarettis verses: I contemplate the boundless silence of a slender

girl .The beautiful woman is in bed, perhaps she has just been woken up and the painter wants to capture quietness and tranquility. Her body is graceful and harmonious, she does not exhibit her nudity and covers her pubis modestly remembering William Wordsworths verses: We are laid asleep..and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, we see into the life of things The artist looks to antique sources portraying the nude body drawing on ancient Greek and Roman myths and it is in line with the great nudes of the French Impressionists and recalls Dante Alighieri,s verses: So noble and so pure seems my lady...she looks so pleasant to those who admire her that she sends sweetness through the eyes into the heart that none can understand who has not felt it All these elements, combined with other technical devices and skills, make his art unique and complex. The purpose of the stratification of multicultural references is to give art a full cross-section of human history and to explore it with the aim of discovering the harmonious and ambiguous individual living.It is important to notice that Christian Furr is a pictorial poet who wants to convey truth to mankind since he considers Art a vehicle of the most profound feelings of heart but in the act of painting he is free from external rules except those imposed on his creative genius recalling Paul Eluards verses Et par le pouvoir dun mot je recommence ma vie Je suis n pour te connaitre pour te nommer Libert. Maria Pia Cappello Rome 28-03-2013