Art Of The Day Weekly
#369 - from 18 December 2014 to 7 January 2015
Hopper comes to life
The genre of live paintings is not new. But in this case it reaches a certain level of perfection. The guiding principal is original, half a century of life in the USA through a the monologue of an actress, through 13 phases marked by the news casts heard over a transistor radio. The actress steps out each time of a painting by Edward Hopper in a surprising way – the game of colors and lights is magnificently precise. This research was the opportunity for the movie director to kill a myth according towhich Hopper was a realistic painter. The rooms he paints have no straight angle, his armchairs are too narrow for anyone to be able to sit in, his beds are three meters long. His work is more an illusion of reality, in an oppressive lack of communication which the movie expresses well. Actually, Hopper is closer to Plato and Calderón de La Barca (Life is a dream) than to documentary photography.
• Shirley, Visions of Reality by Gustav Deutsch, with Stephanie Cumming and Christoph Bach.