There is a strange attraction to looking at persons being repeated. One searches for the differences, and tries to solve the mystery of who to identify with. You get a choice, and the feeling of multiple futures and pasts.
The Mystery of the Horizon
Magritte
The Two Frida´s
Frida Kahlo
From The Realms of the Unreal
Henry Darger
Motive: Magritte described his paintings saying, “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.”
Motive: “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best”.
“Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.”
Much of his artwork is mixed media with collage elements.
Motive: In a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence, Darger wrote of children’s right “to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night’s season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart.”