good chemistry 

Art Historian: Let’s explore this mixed-media piece. The artist Cassidy Rae Marietta titled it "good chemistry". Immediately I’m struck by the convergence of Eros and Thanatos in a lush garden. What is your first impression? Curator: It has an immediately arresting design. The high-contrast color palette within that ornate, Art Nouveau frame creates a visual intensity that pulls you in. The eye bounces all over. It almost feels decorative…but unsettling. Art Historian: Indeed. The skeletal figure embracing the woman—death embracing life. Then all of the growth erupting behind and around them. These erotic art floral themes remind us that beauty is always accompanied by decay. Note the black crescent moon. Curator: And look at how that stark black crescent creates a dramatic negative space. Formally speaking, it balances the weight of the figures huddled below. It is as if even at the moon's quietest, the chaos beneath will forever reach skyward. Art Historian: Yes. I read that black moon as potent symbolic charge in a work of fantasy. I perceive here strong undertones of fertility and feminine power within a landscape of both beauty and symbolic violence. Do you agree that nature becomes eroticized in ways beyond a mere stylized landscape here? Curator: I can see that in how the flora, though quite stylized, also becomes intensely textured with all these colors; but, while one might recognize botanical forms, what the art work appears to be emphasizing is line and color. I think in general what the forms are 'meant to signify' in an explicit way feels very loosey-goosey! Art Historian: Perhaps. It feels to me that in positioning nature alongside our figures this piece considers that we're caught in its cycles. That pattern, and the figure of the feminine—not any clear objective reference in nature itself— becomes the real focus here. Curator: I see what you mean. Even the woman's dark hair is flecked with a starry pattern that is visually interesting: but the patterns feel very insistent here. To me this gives it an undeniable sense of artifice; nature mediated and intensified via an almost manic need to embellish everything on display! Art Historian: This contrast perhaps reveals an uncomfortable dance with our mortality... So beautifully composed in such vivid terms. I shall think about its relation to nature some more. Curator: Indeed, It offers many possible points of visual investigation in a dizzying design!