Studies 1822 - 1885

Editor: So this is Rodolphe Bresdin’s "Studies," dating from somewhere between 1822 and 1885. It's a melange of etching, drawing, and ink on paper. Honestly, at first glance, it looks like a collection of doodles, but something about the details is grabbing my attention. How do you interpret this work? Curator: Oh, Bresdin. What a wonderfully strange bird he was! At first blush, yes, it seems like a series of idle sketches, a notepad page brimming with possibilities. But look closer. See how the figures, landscape, and seemingly random objects are rendered with such deliberate detail? It’s as if Bresdin is creating his own personal encyclopedia, a visual lexicon of his imagination. Doesn't it feel as though you're peering into the artist’s subconscious? What do make you of the seeming discordance and strange juxtapositions? Editor: I hadn't thought about it as peering into someone's subconscious. I suppose, like dreams, the juxtaposition of images that otherwise might not make sense when placed together somehow *do* here. It makes me wonder what his process was. Curator: Exactly! Perhaps Bresdin felt, like many artists, that life, nature, and our imagination are fundamentally discordant, and filled with surreal, nonsensical happenings, that resist our feeble, desperate, attempts at imposing "sense" onto them. So he’s not just representing reality, but the raw, unfiltered flow of thoughts and images, the beauty in their chaotic dance. Is that landscape idyllic, or subtly menacing? It's really a work which prompts reflection on nature, memory, and what it means to be a creative, thinking human. Editor: It’s funny how something that looks so casual can hold so much. It has definitely given me a new way to consider how intention and the unconscious mingle in artmaking. Curator: Precisely! And that, I suspect, is exactly what Bresdin intended. It is an invitation for us to slow down and actually observe and ask ourselves "what's going on here."