THE KISS OF A MAD SYMPHONY  疯狂交响乐之吻

(To see the VIDEO ANIMATION of “ITINERANT CANVAS”, please visit “The kiss of a mad symphony” on my website https://sure-realism.com/ ,The link is at the end of this article )

Love Passion: in Solo or Concerto!?

I – Solo Passion « Self-Love and Narcissism » 

If well-experienced, self-love creates a state of well-being, respect, deep serenity, self-esteem, trust and joie de vivre. It brings about inner stability that enables to remain strong facing adversity and enjoy the daily life with more harmony. Loving oneself is to recognize that we are evolving as humans, that is, everything is temporary. It implies to accept that our limitations, fears, weaknesses, guilt, beliefs, the desires to go through certain experiences, tastes and talents evolve constantly and might be different from those experienced by others. We need to accept them, especially when you do not agree with that being so. People who have a balanced self-love are those able to experience passionate love, it is paving the way for much love to each other. It is this ability to grant trust that we deserve on a daily basis, to recognize its value and believe in its potential. This implies being fully appreciated, recognizing its potential and qualities to get ahead in life. Loving oneself, loving and thriving are more than ever a vital necessity. PASSINATE LOVE has the power to subjugate us. It provides the feeling of living intensely. Hope is renewed and projects fill up our heads.

– individual Narcissism : Self-love is a necessity that enables us to achieve a good personal development, opens the way to creating a fulfilling life on the relational, loving, professional and other levels, from which a sweet feeling of realization is born based on inner strength brought to the forefront.

However, the most foolish of loves is the excessive self-love, it is that which develops exaggerated pride, urges us to shine, be recognized, admired, adored without limits, that can lead to refuse one’s own weakness and refrain from asking for help from other members of our environment.

The famous writer Paul Valéry drew with words these different forms of excess in the “Cantata of Narcissus”

Neither caresses or beating should others suffer

I have my own desires, keep yours.

To mortals as well as Gods, I want to owe nothing

I love myself aside … I pretend to extremes

Sweetness to be everything to myself

I want to see myself and see myself again

He’s crazy in love with himself

“O my beauty … My fkesh … My skin

Gods, What misfortune to be so beautiful

– Wicked narcissism and politics: However, the term narcissism can move from the private and individual to the public, collective and political, when someone is increasingly confused between private and public life, it turns to be very serious and even alarming. We all know the myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own image reflected in water in which he drowned. Remember leaders who would be suffering from “evil narcissism, with their manipulative narcissistic perverts, here I am talking about politicians, statesmen, dictators, and criminal heads of state, some narcissistic personalities have such inflated ego that they identify with the nation they are ruling and they alone are able to save if need be. No need to paint a picture, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco were criminal heads of state in the past, and that one from North Korea and many others today!

Narcissism, this excessive self-love is a destructive and insidious mechanism, couples, societies and even states have died of that inflated ego, that egocentrism, they have died of fatal heroism and excessive ambition!

– Collective narcissism of a group: Does our society stir narcissism?

Each society produces its own mental disorders. Faith in narcissism is indeed one of the current features today, which causes failures and excesses, which have begun to be identified. Today, our society glorifies narcissism, selfishness, and rivalry. Far from being close to that image of an easy world as transmitted by media channels surrounding and pressing us, the world is rather difficult and very stressful. The contemporary, clear-sighted individual is under enormous pressure pushing him very often to take refuge in the illusion of a narcissistic group movement. The small group will settle as a common narcissistic object, the individual’s age, sex, family situation, sexual orientation, morals, genetic characteristics, true or supposed ethnicity or race will drive him/her to express great love for the group and despise any other difference. This narcissism is likely to quickly turn into an inflated clan ego. Groups of individuals, usually made up of aroused teenagers, no longer track their events in private and professional life but rather in collective life. No need again to paint a picture for these narcissistic groups, in the United States where there have been groups of neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements, considered by the US authorities to be potentially the most dangerous among extremists, there has also been the movement for “Identity”, a movement that gathers individuals and small groups of several states, who believe that white Europeans constitute the chosen people. The Jews, for them, are Satan’s children and non-whites are sub-humans. There was also “The Church of the American Knights of the KLU KLUX KLAN”, and many others. In Europe there have been the extreme right skinheads, who consider themselves the only authentic skinheads, a kind of patriotism more and more exacerbated compared to the original skins.

The individual is part of a prevailing sociological tradition which states that the analysis of the individual and the analysis of the group cannot be separated. The individual will eventually develop crazy and dangerous group narcissism to offset this lack of attention.  

 Inappropriate pride, outrageous self-confidence, lack of doubt and absence of reconsidering issues, it is one of the most dangerous psychological dispositions that deprives you of reaching objectivity and balance in everyday life.

In any case, it would be better to learn to maintain self-love without abuse, in order to live the passion of love in concerto and not in solo. It is a matter of seeking a love in which the desire to be loved is at least as strong as the desire to love, if not more. It’s about playing a concerto of passion with a musical arrangement orchestrated by the new “sure-realism”

II-Passion in Concerto: « Sharing burning emotions » 

Loving without indulging into narcissism offers us the opportunity to discover in ourselves the ability to experience emotions whose intensity is unknown for us, loving with passion is to break with a daily life sometimes poor in emulation. It is a matter of loving passionately as passionate love has beneficial and instructive virtues for and on us.

“Mad”, “burning”, “fatal”… words are never strong enough when talking about passionate love, because alongside this overwhelming energy that has carried off more than one on its path, even great love and tenderness seem pale, boring, and routine. Why such fascination? Who does it strike? To what extent can it burn us?

If love evolves normally, it turns to thrive into what is called authentic love. In the latter case, the search for the good of the other takes over. The more we seek the good for the other, the more we are willing to provide him/ her with that love and the more we love him/ her. The great seduction of passionate love comes from the fact that it is so pleasant to experience it together. It should serve as a basis enabling to move towards a much better love. Here, we realize that passionate love has the role of propelling us towards a better love. Being loved makes us stronger, encourages us to give the best of ourselves, to love in return the one loved and those who count for us, to spread our happiness.

 Thus playing the passion of love in concerto offers us a beautiful musical composition full of burning emotions. However, it is up to you to choose to play it solo or in concerto! I therefore suggest that you be imbued with that light of love, which appears in the midst of our complicate existence, apparently in total contradiction to simple and natural things.

Art and the Changing Dynamics of passion

Being the symbol of love passion or maternal love, the kiss has always inspired painters. The representation of the kiss has a very special place in the history of art, at almost all times, from the ancient decoration representations up to the contemporary creations.

As a commonplace of erotic literature since the Renaissance, the kiss, through its symbolic meanings related to love and sexual union, was also an unavoidable artistic motive. In fact, the lovers’ bodies, tenderly embracing and kissing with passion, celebrate this theme both in the murals of Roman culture and in many paintings and sculptures until the twentieth century.

Represented in concerto, the kiss was interpreted in all shapes and colors, from the example of the tantric sculpture “Temple Chitragupta to Khajurâto” in India in the 11th century, to the paintings of contemporary art. The first example of the kiss which shows passionate love is an ancient sculpture of the Chitragupta Temple in Khajurâto , India, dating back from the eleventh century.

In1734, the Russian painter François Boucher painted “Hercules and Omphale”through which he inaugurated the expression and presentation of the first kiss in a pictorial scene.

Around 1855 Eugene Delacroix painted the moment when Romeo, resolved to die, came into the crypt of the Capulets to bid farewell to his young wife before swallowing the vial of poison. The title allows us to understand that, Romeo and Juliet at the tomb of the Capulets, shows the climax of the tragedy of lovers Romeo and Juliet. In the story of William Shakespeare, this is the moment when Romeo comes into the crypt of the Capulets on the tomb of Juliet, to announce to Juliet that it is destined to certain death. Shocked by the news, as described above, Juliette falls into Romeo’s arms expressing her suffering. She is dressed only in a sheet, for she is supposed to be on her deathbed.

The Kiss of Auguste Rodin (1889), is a marble sculpture of couple embracing, created by Auguste Rodin at the request of the French State for the Universal Exhibition of Paris of 1889. It is on display at at Rodin Museum in Paris.The Kiss was hailed as a masterpiece when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1877 and even today it is still one of the most well-known and admired pieces of sculpture in the world. In creating this piece Rodin drew on his experience to capture the mood of a particular moment and managed to create a sense of sensuality and romance.

“The Kiss” by Edvard Munch is an oil on canvas that the Norwegian Symbolist artist painted in 1897. Part of his series The Frieze of Life, which illustrates the stages of a relationship between a woman and a man, The Kiss is the painting which belongs to a theme on which Munch had been experimenting since 1888-1889: a couple kissing, their faces melting together to symbolize unity.

As for “The Kiss” of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, it was painted between 1907 and 1908, at the peak of his golden age. We see in The Kiss a couple embracing on a flower bed that looks like a meadow. The couple is wrapped in golden garment. The decoration of this garment, like a mosaic, varies according to gender: for the man, white and black rectangles, for the woman, coloured circles and flowers. From this set, we can see heads and hands emerge making up an expression of deep intimacy. The woman is kneeling, giving herself to her lover with closed eyes, allowing to be dragged the passion of love. The work also reflects a harmonious world where the couple withdraw in a sublime feeling of love, unaware of the reality around them, moving into an unreal and utopian universe involving a great loving power. Klimt combines artistic joy with sexual pleasure and gives the latter a spiritual dimension.

In 1925, Picasso painted “The Kiss” in the Cubist manner. Picasso did not imitate “The Kiss”, the iconic work of the golden period of the Austrian painter Klimt, featured by a pictorial surface with a number of gold leaves and inspired by Byzantine mosaics.Klimt represents the fusion of the lovers withdrawing from the world, in a sphere free from time and space, with a kneeling woman giving herself to her companion with closed eyes on a carpet of flowers, indulging into a loving passion; the loving pleasure seems to combine with the artistic joy. On the contrary, in “The Kiss” of Picasso painted eighteen years later, the image of the two lovers around what is supposed to bring them closer, provokes and shocks the viewer: the man is looking for sex while the woman, in search of love, attaches less importance to this extravagant male desire. This painting does not have the meaning of the kiss preceding the sexual act or love; it is neither an act of happy ending in the beautiful stories of princesses or fairy tales, nor a simple intention for reconciliation between man and woman in common life. About extravagance in “The Kiss”, the title does not only denote the preliminaries of an intimate relationship but rather a conflict between two beings as well; it becomes a source of questions about the reality of love in the couple’s relationship. The images stand for the roles given to both sexes according to Freud’s theories in the act of love, the passive role for the woman and the active one for the man. The kiss, usually a promise for an intimate union, as in Shakespeare’s characters, Romeo and Juliet, or a movement of a body in search of the other partner, becomes in Picasso’s painting a rejection by the woman who seems to defend herself against the aggressive desire of man.

In 1928, the surrealist René Magritte painted “The Lovers”. Magritte painted the kiss of the veiled Lovers, as a metaphor of desire, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, in connection with the unconscious, a theme expressed by surrealism. In that sense, these lovers desire remains deeply mysterious, always going beyond the other one loved who remains veiled. The veil could therefore be a symbol of desire, the lovers being overwhelmed by their own desire and wanting essentially the desire more than the other loved one. The lover never really knows who he desires, nor even who he is himself as an object of the other’s desire.

“The birthday” is a painting painted by Marc Chagall in 1931. He wanted to paint one of his dreams which involves his lover Bella. This surrealist work is one of his first paintings, made with oil-based paint on a cardboard. It is exhibited in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. In Chagall’s painting “The Lovers”, there is an erotic movement of entwining flowing naturally from the Torah in the couple. It is very striking that in many Chagall’s paintings of couples, the lover embraces the beloved like the prophet Torah, like God and his people.

“ITINERANT CANVAS” OF A “Mad Symphony”:

Itinerant canvas !.. Mad symphony !..Mad pedagogical attempt !…extensive show!.. is it madness ?.. Am I crazy !? ……

This “mad Symphony” offers a new orchestral composition totally different from the previous melodies, it is building a new writing that meets the requirements and objectives of the new “SURE-REALISM”, seeks creative cooperation not only between the most different human and social features, but also between the various plastic components of pictorial space. It is about responding to the complexity of human nature characterized by a cocktail of realism, surrealism, expressionism, impressionism and sometimes even abstract obsessions. New relationships remain to be established in order to recreate a new result.Thus.

In this “mad symphony”, Passion reaches its peak. Love-passion is recognized by its intensity and the speed through which it makes its appearance in all directions. Just like in the “Concerto Grosso”, where the motor pace is repetitive and the harmonic patterns are centred around the tonic of orchestral composition, passion of love and the kiss.

This “mad symphony” should express the intensity of the kiss as spiritual perspective .The objective is to achieve and express this absolute infinity of passion, it has been necessary to break through, or rather infringe the limits of the fourth dimension, travel through the ” umpteenth Dimension”, so that the space is no longer attached to a specific direction or moment, the image is free and moves.

Thanks to its double signature, it can be exposed in all directions with the same meaning. the painting will no longer be fixed, it will no longer have only one angle of view, nor a limited orientation, it is continually in motion , it is mobile, it is rotating . The canvas will no longer be sedentary, it requires movement and displacement. Throught this “mad symphony”, Madness manifests itself in the conceptual dimension of the image, in the level of its staging , on the perception of object and its relation to space ,which I called “ITINERANT CANVAS”*

(To see the VIDEO ANIMATION of “ITINERANT CANVAS”, please visit the page of “The kiss of a mad symphony” on my website https://sure-realism.com/ )

The itinerant canvas” is explicitly placed in a mad pedagogical attempt, It is a new Mannerist regime of the image, painting refers to something that is no longer solely sedentary and classical image, it is spectacle, it moves. Here, It is necessary to seek much more what is movement, it is the rhythm movement. In a painting, the relationships of colors and shapes are obviously a movement. , but when you give a new rhythm to this movement of report, you will provoke an extensive show, a living object,vibrant and lively.

This reflection on the perception of objects and their relation to space began with Frank Stella, American artist who initiated minimalism, he invented the process of shaped canvas or “cut-out canvas” whose series “Copper Paintings” will remain the most famous, his works are revealing of the surrounding space that they include as a decisive element, techniques that have profoundly marked the evolution of contemporary art.

The kiss of this “mad canvas” is the expression of two opposite concerto instruments that share the same passion by playing the same accompaniment, applying to the range of sacred and secular works . However, there is a first very apparent reading, that of the concerto of passionate love between the biological, racial and cultural differences of the human being.

The Kiss of this “mad symphony” seeks to draw our attention , not only to the undertones of the concerto of passionate love, but also to the passion for material interests between states. The first interpretation could lead us towards another reading, that is much more political than humanitarian; it is that of acting in favour of a passion concerto, not in favour of passionate love between individuals, but rather the passion of interests between states. States such as the US and CHINA, which should forget each other’s inflated narcissisms and avoid playing their passion in solo, avoid suicide in front of this fatal heroism and this overweening ambition to dominate the world!.This option was expressed by the biological and clothing features between two different traditional concept of aesthetics,the American Boys and the Chenese Tianjinoise.

Again, I tried to intervene through art in the course of political affairs. Again, I wanted to question Rousseau’s thesis which “rejects the idea of moralizing through art, that emotion is transient, superficial, and that the pity we can feel for the image is a sterile pity which feeds on some tears and which will never produce the slightest act of humanity, that the hope of an effective regeneration of society through art would be only a chimera”. Again, I have insisted on swimming against the stream to turn art into plausible reality and not into unnecessary idealism. I have call for a moral edification which should lead us to real action. Please! We should act together, so that Rousseau’s thesis will no longer be justified.

Dear political leaders, it is up to you to compose the concerto and orchestrate this mad symphony, for the sake of your interests! for the love of all peoples!

*(A constitutive and declarative deposit of an innovation certificate “ITINERANT CANVAS” was made at COPYRIGHT-France, the concept and its technical exploitation are now protected by the law of intellectual property law.)

Dear readers ! If you enjoyed this post, I’d love continue to share with you a variety of topics. You might enjoy my other posts, below .

I appreciate your comments and feeback. Thank you for your readearship

-THE MANIFESTO. A PLEA FOR THE NEW « SURE-REALISM »

-THE UMPTEENTH DIMENSION

-THE SYMPHONY OF OPPOSITES

– THE SYMPHONY OF LOVE « THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE »

– ON THE ARTIST AND POLITICS

-THE SPIRITUAL SYMPHONY

-THE SYMPHONY OF THE MYSTERIOUS GREENBACK

– THE CURSED SYMPHONY

The author , Writer or painter! Mourad Elloumi is a professional Artist-Painter and Professor Emeritus of Visual Art, he works to give art and architecture the status of humanities and sciences, thus enabling their authors to participate in philosophical and socio-political debate. The first renaissance artists consider it necessary to combine their work with the writings that found their arts (such as the well-known mathematician, philosopher, painter and theorist – De picture- in 1435- Leon Battista Albert). His recent conceptual and plastic research of the « Sure-realism »meets that remarkable necessity of the renaissance years, a necessity that is unfortunately still neglected by a great number of artists today.