Timeless Isolation

1-     No room for necessities as we cling too much to whatever non-essential

Man is a social creature and must seek, as such, the means to connect with his fellows so as to meet the needs for changes and development, he needs to face contradiction and thus adversity to achieve his own growth, he needs direct learning experiences to forge his character, develop his body, actually fulfil his intelligence and his sensitiveness, he needs to acquire moral qualities and wide range of skills: learning to live in society, managing time, reasoning, taking responsibility.

This is done not only at school but also within the family, and through all kinds of activities: doing sport, taking up art activities, discovering the world, joining associations, attending meetings, festivals and fairs, going on outings, trips … opportunities to mingle with the crowd, maintain high quality relationships are required. This kind of learning will enable you to lay the foundation and build higher.

However, new technologies would tend to hinder human contact while family and social relationships are depleted or even lost and many people would escape reality, staying behind their screens. The question that arises then is whether the human being has the ability to reward this need for direct contact with nature by means of virtual communications. Can we say that by seeking warmth through a hyper virtual communication, we might fall into a dopamine that would lead us to isolation! Are we “real” or “virtual”?

Whether this tendency to be separated from the rest of one’s environment is desired or undergone, it necessarily affects our life vision and locks us into a reality built on illusions, prejudices or widespread beliefs. Today, we tend to think that we are living in a connected world but we have become indifferent to human contact, indifferent to the sights of nature arounds us, indifferent to the priorities of family ties.

Because of my own professional experience, apparently isolation is a subject that bears great importance to me more than anything; I often spend most of my days in front of my canvas, coming up with reflections which I put down on paper, sometimes without seeing the daylight. Fortunately, I usually have, next to my linen canvas, another Canvas with different size and material but which has special effectiveness, it is that magical tool of communication which has turned the world into a small village allowing to communicate quickly and easily with people all over the world, from India to Australia, going through the United States, … Hi James, Sir Jim, dear Irina, Gulnar …. And you Dr. Sonam! Rosetta, Lycia … sometimes I wonder, are we “real” or “virtual”?

 2-  Illustrated Isolation: “Art does not produce what is visible, it makes visible”. Paul Klee

Isolation affects a growing number of individuals in modern societies. Being victims of this phenomenon for a long time, the elderly are no longer the only category concerned: students, young people, teenagers … suffer the same fate. Nobody has escaped this rise in mobility which has expanded rapidly for 20 years, no one is concerned about statistics on loneliness and isolation despite the latest findings showing a very unsettling reality: the number of people claiming to be alone has doubled in the last three decades from 20% to 40%.

–  Causes of Isolation

A sizable extensive literature has been interested in the phenomenon of isolation. It has raised a warning based on a wide variety of causes: fear of the people’s views, shyness, lack of self-confidence, long-term unemployment or upsetting events undermining the social bond (breakup love, death of a relative, accident…).

However, Art has come up with unusual, more intense, deeper connotations, sometimes presented according to a hyper-realism, sometimes through a utopian surrealism and often according to a fugitive impressionism and that cannot be related to any literary analysis.

Formerly, in 1496 during the period of the first renaissance, the famous painter Florentin SANDRO BOTICHELLI addresses the theme of isolation and loneliness by painting his work “melancholy”.

– Five centuries later, the famous American painter, Edward Hopper (1882-1927) has wonderfully represented the relationship between the modern way of life and isolation in his work “Automat” realized in 1927.

Edward Hopper depicts in this wonderful painting, a young woman alone in a kind of American cafeteria, an Automate place where people could buy their food from machines. The title of the painting creates a parallel between the place where the scene takes place and the young woman who could look like a machine with her eyes devoid of any expression, showing mechanical gesture. The work is cold, its colours, the light made by neon tubes, the way the scene is made and  the woman’s clothes strengthen this feeling even if the cafeteria has a cast-iron radiator. The young woman, lost in thought, is at the centre of the canvas. Everything converges towards her and intensifies her break-up with the world while she seems unable to escape.

Isolation is the assessment of a situation in which an individual is separated willingly or by force from the rest of his or her usual environment; he or she is generally said to be a person who is physically or morally alone. When we refer to the notion of isolation, we first see space confinement, images of silence and solitude as presented by the same painter, who translated his own personal affections to the scale of the whole population and offers us a collective and social painting, through his paintings he reflected the malaise of modernity. In “Morning sun” Hopper manages to make us share an impression of isolation, a worry or quietness, in a landscape, which at first sight seems devoid of life, talking to oneself in an act of daily isolation.

However, the notion of isolation could as well mean the mental confinement in an ideological and theoretical field, which, unfortunately, no one talks about, such as those who are prisoners of their own understanding, enslaved by their sole reason, adopting an anti-social extremist behaviour associated to aversion and contempt for the other, a persistent irresponsibility facing moral rules and an indifference to social norms and cultural codes, as well as to the emotions and rights of others as symbolized by this painting which criticizes the mental confinement.

Isolation can also be a health need, as much as the isolation cited in the Bible, when lepers were excluded from the population. In the nineteenth century it was recommended to place patients in separate institutions. Isolation is also used in psychiatry to protect other patients from a particularly dangerous patient. The British painter Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) was able to describe this other aspect of isolation in his painting entitled: ‘Solitude’ (1890, Oil on canvas, Maryhill Museum of Art, Washington, USA).

– In another work of art, “The sadness of loneliness”, Van Gogh shows that the notion of isolation could be at the source of a pathological state. Isolation is translated through an attitude of self-withdrawal and uneasiness that can often have several origins … soul crisis, sensitivity crisis, such as Vincent Van Gogh’s life which was linked to loneliness and isolation, a fact which makes up a paradox when we think of the painter’s will to live and create among other artists. But Vincent Van Gogh does not know how to live with others, he devours by his doubts, he is worrying through his instability and his passion.The sadness of loneliness (Van Gogh) The style of Van Gogh: a man, a crisis.

– Prison isolation is another particular form of imprisonment where a prisoner has no contact with other people except prison staff. This isolation can be decided for more undisciplined, more dangerous detainees or for national security issues such as terrorism. On the other hand, a “suffered” isolation breaches the basic relational needs of the person. It is then found – for many reasons whether external and / or specific to his personality – in situation of social isolation: His social relationships are reduced or lost, leading most of the time to a feeling of pain and loneliness. Prisoners often spend time alone in isolation and their psychological state may worsen as expressed in this painting.

-Salvador Dali, the famous Spanish painter, had been to the end of surrealism by expressing the isolation of places, I can even consider his utopian spaces as a path to the tragic finalities of human isolation. The impression given by these places is similar to that of a feeling of anxiety and human loneliness.”Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape”, the phantasmagorical creatures and the contradictory associations of his canvases must be interpreted as symbols coming from the unleashing of the unconscious.

–   Consequences of Isolation

Social isolation has adverse effects not only on mental health but also on physical health. The following works illustrate these different negative effects, they are paintings of masters with unique connotations which explain the harmful consequences of this new evil of the century.

 – The negative effects can be observed in alcoholics as expressed by Pablo Picasso in his work “La buveuse d’absinthe” (the female absinthe drinker).

The theme of loneliness, isolation and emptiness in a café is not new. In the second half of the 19th century, it could be found in the works of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec. But so far, we have not found any sense of drama in the paintings of the young Spanish painter. Our lonely heroine is sitting at a table in a café where at the background there is a dirty red wall reinforcing the feeling of isolation and discomfort. The flatness of the canvas, the colour of the walls and the bluish tone of the marble table seem to indicate an inner space enclosing the woman in her desperate solitude. The expressive distortion of the right hand, seem to redouble the inner tension.

In 1891, Munch made a large number of sketches on the theme of melancholy, in which he made various positions of the character and those of the seaside, the character sitting on the shore would be a symbol expressing a deep human feeling of isolation and “melancholy”.

Suicide, the most violent consequence of isolation, is a problem that is still rarely tackled head-on while the phenomenon is widespread on a global scale. Remember Van Gogh, the suicide of society, this great painter had never been crazy. He was outstandingly rather lucid, which had undermined the certainties of his time. Conflicting with society as a whole, he experienced an internal exile and exclusion, which led him to suicide, after burning his hand and cutting off his ear.

The « Starry Night » is a painting by Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. The painting represents what Van Gogh was able to see and extrapolate from the room he lived in at the monastery asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889. He painted this painting a year before his death, suffering from immense societal isolation. The MOMA documentation has interpreted the cypress tree in the foreground as a symbol of death, being a tree planted in cemeteries. Its position between the sky and the ground reinforces this impression.

The British painter Henry Wallis (1830-1916) belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite movement had marked suicide in a painting entitled The Death of Chatterton, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. This work describes the late moments of the poet Thomas Chatterton, who had taken poison out of despair at the age of seventeen. Hero of the eighteenth century, he was nevertheless considered by Wallis and many young artists as a romantic figure.

In this work, he uses a combination of frank and contrasting colours and exploits the natural light of a small window to give a chiaroscuro effect very popular at that time. He also tried to recreate the attic where the poet died for the sake of authenticity.

 

The Death of Chatterton, Henry Wallis (1830-1916)

This silence of death is interpreted differently in the painting “Paysage aux lanternes” by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897 – 1994). Post-impressionist, expressionist then surrealist, he managed to represent the feelings of silence and isolation, worry, threat and nostalgia in his canvas.

This ambivalence is taking on a new dimension today: the opposition between friendliness and isolation is enhanced by the role of new communication technologies and social networks. But this phenomenon isn’t but the culmination of a long history that began in antiquity, where intellectuals had already put the terms of the alternative: the man “social animal” and the lover of bucolic charms.

 3-Isolation: Internet paradox

Nowadays, social networks have significantly increased the flow of possible contacts. Currently, many homes have a computer with internet connection. This means of communication has become almost essential! It is indeed a great tool at the level of communication and information. If this means has been a way of reproducing and recreating new links with the outside world, it remains at the same time a trigger of contemporary isolation. It is a hope against trouble that seems to grow and to which no one really seems to remedy.

The psychologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Audibert, author of The inability to be alone (Payot 2011) states that our era is full of ways to connect with each other: the phone, the Internet, or even the fact of moving quickly and easily. But these new tools reinforce the consciousness of loneliness because when they condemn it, they shade light on it. Because they have a Smartphone, some people regularly count calls, “like” received, their “followers … “.

Their value depends on their number hence their security. Because being alone is a form of danger for the vulnerable people that we are. “This is the paradox: basically, essentially, we are alone, but we need to have physical and psychological company so as not to die, first, and then to live without the consciousness of loneliness and death having to overshadow existence, ” the therapist says.

  Internet can be useful for academic work for research, homework, school presentations, etc. Internet has no limit and continues to grow. It provides a lot of information on all topics when you go to serious sites and make sure to check the sources!

Young people use the internet mainly to communicate either by mail or via “instant messages” or social networks (eg Facebook, Ovoo, Skype, twitter, …). They communicate not only with their everyday friends but also with people sometimes at the other end of the world. These communications sometimes encourage some shy teenagers to express themselves. It is indeed easier to talk about oneself behind one’s computer without seeing one’s interlocutor. The young person can thus have more confidence in himself. Thanks to the internet young people can also relax and play educational games or just for fun. Parents are sometimes relieved to see the child entertained at home rather than elsewhere but beware the Internet has also its misdeeds and we must remain cautious because on the one hand the Internet is an essential mode of socialization and can help young people to get out of isolation through forums or social networks by creating new relationships but it can similarly lead to desocialization or total isolation. This apparent paradox is pushed to the extreme by these new technologies and the internet. Indeed, most of us are lucky enough to escape the duty of searching for food for their survival. On the other hand, the need for information, contacts, immediate purchases, answers or discovery is reinforced by social media in general and our smartphones in particular. While being pervasive faithful companions, they provide immediate satisfaction of these needs and are a good opportunity for further exploration, stimulating the production of almost continuous dopamine, but this has unfortunately not been able to reduce the phenomenon of isolation!

One of the major paradoxes of our world of hyper-communication: We flee and want it at the same time.

By spending their time on various platforms (discussion sites, blogs, social networks or professionals), Internet users believe they have created social links. When we know that exposure to unplanned events also stimulates dopamine production, we understand the impact of alerts, pop-ups, ringtones and other notifications appearing on our screens. One stimulus engenders another, then another, and yet another, hindering consciousness and taking a step back. It does not matter where to go, as long as what we are seeking in an insatiable quest or for pleasure becomes impossible.

However, being alone in front of the screen, the individual gradually loses contact with the outside world and that is the flip side of the coin. Here the studies are contradictory. But the Internet would be a factor of social isolation for many individuals. More and more people spend hours surfing for research, work, or “chatting” with “friends” via social media.

A child who depends on his cell phone becomes himself a prisoner; he is facing isolation and can react negatively to this obsession. Polish artist Pawel Kuczynski has created a collection of humour-infused illustrations that mocks society’s unhealthy obsession with Facebook and their computers.

 Satirical Illustration Show Our Addiction to Technology

According to an Ipsos study conducted in France, young people aged 4 to 14 spend an average of three hours per day in front of screens. Young people aged 16 to 24 give an overall time of 9 hours and 24 minutes to activities which seek consulting and viewing televisions, digital tablets, game consoles, smartphones, and almost four hours in total per day having their eyes fixed on their mobile phones (according to the 12th Barometer of the visual health realized on behalf of the national association for the vision improvement (Asnav) which gathers the entire industry (manufacturers, opticians, ophthalmologists, etc.). As for parents, they spend 4 hours a day on their smartphones and PCs. This then the modern family: it goes through the internet.

For a number of experts, new technologies are introducing perverse effects in human relations. They can represent a refuge for a person seeking to avoid confrontation or the difficulty of a real relationship by allowing him to find the illusion, through these palliatives, to fill his solitude in a virtual way.

By staying alone for hours in front of his screen, the user may isolate himself further. For some, parents and friends no longer exist, or almost. Unconsciously, they limit contact with a virtual world for the benefit of the spouse and children. Some will not hesitate to make up a whole life, very different from theirs, to have friends whom they hardly know. They would tell their secrets to these “friends” rather than their relatives. Moreover, a study revealed, in 2009, that 55% of Americans who surf the web discuss important topics, or personal, with other Internet users they hardly know. Some people can reach a kind of “unreality syndrome” and will drown in artificial paradises. So, the slightest criticism, the slightest failure – at school or in love – the negative look of a teacher, betrayal of a friend, all this turn them into vulnerable or quickly unhappy.

 Confessional – Pawel Kuczynski Canvas

 Social networks are the first cause of the most widespread evil in the world: loneliness. The presentation below is a powerful demonstration . Perhaps it is therefore high time we became aware of the consequences of this slavery, to put technology back into its role as a tool and to recreate real links between us. The same applies to our mental and physical health (and the future of our society)

One of the isolation factors is working from distance. It is true that Internet makes research and the exchange of information easier but workers are no longer gathered in a common place. Some of them work together for months and years without ever meeting. They exchange e-mails, talk on the phone, communicate via internal networks! Contacts between colleagues are no longer necessary.

4- Timeless Isolation : it’s a « living separate apart »

Technology has brought about a distance that, ultimately, has an impact on the life in society and the very nature of human resources. In the end, why leave one’s residence while it is possible to work there and maintain links with the office and customers?! Contacts between spouses have changed. It seems that because of screens, around 2030, couples will not make love anymore.

Basically, the problem is not so much about these instruments that can make you plunge into isolation, but about your motivation and your true willingness to make these provisions a means of friendliness instead of indifference. One of the major paradoxes of our world of hyper-communication is: I love you and I hate you.

Faced with the climax of the hyper-communication phenomenon, it is high time we sounded the alarm and became aware of the consequences of this new form of contemporary slavery.

So, in order not to be overwhelmed by the timeless isolation phenomenon, it is essential to do some work on oneself and to take a step back with regard to the life events, an opportunity to confront our vision and the paradox of these new communication tools to reconsider them with a fresh eye. It is in hyper-communication that true loneliness lies.

All in all, I can say that the beneficial contribution of social networks is a golden opportunity, that the usability of real human contacts is a virtue, that Plato compares gold and virtue to two weights in a scale where one cannot rise without the other falling, and that ultimately, the artist’s feeling wanted to denounce and express the burden of gold at the expense of virtue!

Thus, the main building elements of space retract to isolate the “surfer” in a pyramidal construction that stands for the “feeling” of immortality and eternity of the supra-cosmic world of communication.

To reinforce the psychological impact of isolation, the Internet surfer feels introverted, immersed in an illusionist world, space, plans, colors, the body structure is fragmented and stylized by a pixels motion. The surfer shows an indifferent attitude to everything around, immersed in his dreams, insensitive to beautiful and real human encounters, … a picnic, a caress, loving, feeling the smell of the other, a frugal meal! Good bread, tomatoes, oranges, cherries … damn it was good! as good as EDOUARD MANET’s “Lunch on the Grass” or Auguste Macke’s “Walk”.

To mark the physical aspect of isolation, I chose the diptych * as an aid for two reasons: on the one hand this process with great mystical connotation of the sixteenth century should remind us of the humanist period of the Renaissance which perceives the world in a different way, with Man at the center of the universe.

On the other hand, the diptych should mark out the physical aspect of isolation, so that the subject falls on two entrenched sides, two separate areas,two separate areas, it is a “living separate apart” and not a “living together apart”, it is the isolation of the pairs!!!(* Diptych:a set of two separate units that maintain correspondence).

This painting is an allegory that seeks freedom with regard to this form of mental alienation , which has bad individual and social consequences. It is call to the less young people for a rebalancing of excesses and a non-respect of these new imposed conventions.

Denouncing, overcoming and reinventing reality, writing tomorrow’s history starting from that of the present and that of yesterday, thinking and acting outside any scope of time and space, that is the art of developing the image of the temporal to express another timeless dimension, it is the art of mixing the sensitive to the intelligible. It’s the art of Sure-Realism.

Now I’m not going to say anything anymore, I just invite you to interpret by yourself this painting and give it the necessary connotations.

The artists of the first Renaissance and at their head “Leon Battista Alberti” believe that it is necessary that their works should go along with literature that founds their arts. This descriptive and explanatory analysis meets this remarkable need of the Renaissance years, a necessity unfortunately neglected by a very large number of artists. The famous theoretician and professor emeritus in didactics of plastic arts “Bernard-André Gaillot” said: Naming means to be in control of things, to use the vocabulary tools which will contribute to the understanding of the artistic facts ”

 written on June 18, 2018