This is not a Paradise - the realism of dreams genre

This is not a paradise.

It belongs to my "Return of Peter Pan" Series, but there is a difference with the other paintings from this series, it's much darker and more philosophical than the others.

I am back into oil. It is an absolute pleasure to smell the turpentine, the oil paints and all the chemicals I am using when working with oil. I forgot how wonderful and magnificent oil technique is. I am using the traditional method – layering and glazing. But the background of this painting is partly made using acrylics.

The symbols in the image of my work are very obvious. My poor harlequin isn't very happy, is he?
He is balancing on top of his freedom. He has two choices: selling his soul to the nasty snake or to a shiny apple. There is another choice, extreme one: the suicide. But I can see his inability to commit it.

This is not a paradise!

Franz Sedlacek

Last November I spent 3 weeks in Vienna. I had enough time to visit my favourite museums, galleries, cafés and all the other interesting places. As usual I also went to the Leopold Museum. Jim wanted to see all those famous Schiele paintings and I wanted to see the special exhibition "Between the Wars - Austrian Artist" from 1918 till 1938; ( By the way this exhibition has been extended until March 3, 2008).

At the exhibition "Between the Wars", they were lots of very good, interesting paintings and artists. Some of them I had never heard before. But one painter has totally stolen my heart, his name is Franz Sedlacek. Born in Wroclaw (now Poland) in 1891, he disappeared (missing presumed dead) in Poland in 1945.

His style is cool, in some way very quantum physics-like and magical. With Salvador Dali you can see the perfection, the sophisticated imagination but also a kind of fake. With Franz Sedlacek you see the imperfection, but also the passion for his work. He is honest in his own magical world.

The Kunsthandel Widder gallery in Vienna has lots of his drawings and few of his paintings in its collection. If I had some spare amount of money I would be extremely tempted to buy one of his paintings.

According to the books and the art critics his paintings belong to the style Magic Realism and Neue Sachlichkeit. Often his style was also described as Poetic or Allegoric Realism.

The term Magic Realism (Magischen Realismus) was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the style of the paintings at the exhibition in Mannheim in 1924.

(See an article about magic realism in Wiki – In my view it is not totally correct and in many ways confusing, but I am an alien so who am I to quibble).

Franz Sedlacek

Lied in der Dammerung, Franz Sedlacek

Training Field, 1926

Sedlacek, Franz