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Aesthetic beauty, more specifically the aesthetic beauty of paintings, is something man has created to emphasise all that is good and communicable to his fellow man. To answer the question of why that is, is simple. Painting, if beauty is the artists goal, is man’s attempt to marry the earth with the heavens. Don’t be mistaken, beauty does not need to always portray the serene and the decorous, it can be a scene of disturbing horror, but as long as it is imbued with a sense of morality, beauty is amplified.
Beauty functions on a variety of levels, to take man to a higher level, release him from the triviality of his own life and transport him to another place, a place where the imagination rules supreme. As John Keats poem goes “.. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth … The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream; – he awoke and found it truth …”
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Sadly beauty today is, on the most part, suffocated by the demon of narcissism, who exerts an iron grip on the collective psyche of contemporary art, with art teachers and lecturers acting as his unholy army, teaching young artists to revile beauty in all its forms. However, believe it or not, I am no pessimist, but rather cautiously optimistic, for there are many modern artists out there dispensing with the vulgar and the puerile, in favour of exploring what beauty actually means.
Italian animator and film maker Rino Stefano Tagliafierro has taken the question of “what is beauty?” and attempted to answer it, in a serene and ethereal film, which takes 115 classical paintings, from the likes of Albert Bierstadt, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Caravaggio et al, and brings them to life.
In an interview with Fast Company, Rino said “The idea of Beauty is born from the desire to (convey) the main emotions that every person encounters throughout his life path. Classical art has always attracted my most intense emotions, so I decided to (let it) represent them.”
Rino’s words are as deep as any philosopher when it comes to classical art, because within those paintings, the narcissism that I spoke of before clouds genuine emotion, in favour of kitsch or just plain revolting immediacy, and immediate emotions are just the tip of man’s consciousness.
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The narrative of Rino’s ‘Beauty’ is eternal, covering the gamut of the human life cycle, from youth and vitality to death and decay. A thoughtful meditation which incorporates Romanticism, Noe-Classicism, Pastoralism and Mannerism. Rino divulged further in his interview with Fast Company, explaining his methods of creating this magisterial work – “I elaborated the images with photo editing software, and used cut-out digital,” he explains of the techniques he used to bring Beauty to life. “It’s a meticulous process that consists of the characters cut out from the depths of rebuilding and redesigning the hidden parts. Then, I animated the subjects with After Effects.”
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