Phronema Perfumes - Coronation of Sesostris Extrait de Parfum
Cy Twombly's epic 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris, is a singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York. The painting is a response to Twombly's fascination with war and is compared to Beethoven's Eroica symphony in the way it dashes through emotional extremes and pounding cadences. The painting depicts the solar barge of Sesostris mythologized by the sun god Ra in his journey across the sky. The exhibition presents a complex tango between image and text where both mediums are metaphoric translations of each other. The edge between them creates a space of incongruence and paradox, which is pungently defined, with verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint alternating in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance.
The cycle can be seen as a kind of symphony of emotional extremes, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic, and the majestic. The bittersweet nature of desire is evoked through the text inscribed on the paintings, particularly the fragments of Sappho's poetry, further heighten this sense of the paradoxical nature of desire, as they describe the "sensational crisis" of joy and pain coexisting.
At the same time, the painting's use of both image and text, and the way they interact with each other, creates a space of incongruence and paradox that mirrors the tensions and contradictions inherent in desire. Image and text can never have a literal correspondence, and instead can only be metaphoric translations of each other. This suggests that meaning itself is a kind of negotiation between different forms of representation, and that our attempts to understand the world around us are always mediated by the limits of language and perception.
notes: tobacco, castoreum, immortelle, benzoin, deer musk, myrrh, labdanum
Cy Twombly's epic 10-part painting, Coronation of Sesostris, is a singular focus of an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York. The painting is a response to Twombly's fascination with war and is compared to Beethoven's Eroica symphony in the way it dashes through emotional extremes and pounding cadences. The painting depicts the solar barge of Sesostris mythologized by the sun god Ra in his journey across the sky. The exhibition presents a complex tango between image and text where both mediums are metaphoric translations of each other. The edge between them creates a space of incongruence and paradox, which is pungently defined, with verbal meaning of the script and visceral sensation of the paint alternating in focus, hinging upon each other as they dance.
The cycle can be seen as a kind of symphony of emotional extremes, with alternating rushes of the funereal, the rhapsodic, and the majestic. The bittersweet nature of desire is evoked through the text inscribed on the paintings, particularly the fragments of Sappho's poetry, further heighten this sense of the paradoxical nature of desire, as they describe the "sensational crisis" of joy and pain coexisting.
At the same time, the painting's use of both image and text, and the way they interact with each other, creates a space of incongruence and paradox that mirrors the tensions and contradictions inherent in desire. Image and text can never have a literal correspondence, and instead can only be metaphoric translations of each other. This suggests that meaning itself is a kind of negotiation between different forms of representation, and that our attempts to understand the world around us are always mediated by the limits of language and perception.
notes: tobacco, castoreum, immortelle, benzoin, deer musk, myrrh, labdanum