Dimensions: 152.5 cm (height) x 151 cm (width) (Netto)
Edvard Weie made this painting, Romantic Fantasy, with oil on canvas. Just look at the way the paint has been daubed and swirled onto the canvas. I can almost feel the artist at work, building up these earthy colors, shifting and changing his mind. There’s something really playful about it, like he’s wrestling with the image and trying to coax it into being. I feel the struggle of his mark-making, the deep blues, browns, and yellows sitting next to peach and flesh tones. The thick texture gives the whole painting a kind of earthy energy. It’s like looking at a landscape, or maybe a body—or both. It’s hard to tell what it is, but the gestures feel really physical and present. Weie seems to be in conversation with other painters of the time, each one taking cues from the last, pushing the language of painting in new directions. Painting is a site of inquiry, a way of seeing and experiencing the world that embraces ambiguity and uncertainty.
Comments
Among the different themes addressed by Edvard Weie, the so-called ”compositions” held the greatest fascination for him. The motifs often draw on literature or mythology, and Weie looked to the great masters of art history for inspiration. The painting's motif In all likelihood, the source for this painting was the Italian Renaissance artist Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope from 1523-25. Correggio’s picture shows the nymph Antiope reclining naked in the lower right part of the canvas, while Zeus, having adopted the guise of a faun, appears from behind a tree. In Weie’s painting we recognise the reclining female figure with her curves and luminously white skin, whereas the faun’s shape and colouring merges with the wilderness. Fragments of landscape are interwoven with tactile brushstrokes. The meeting of the sexes, the sense of attraction and potential seduction that lies at the heart of the scene, has been translated into a dynamic drama of colour, shape, and tactility. A new Romantic vein of art The ambition behind Weie’s compositions was nothing less than to create a new Romantic vein of art, capable of depicting the tremendous drama of life with true grandeur. Guided by Romantic music, this new art was to be shaped by harmonies and sounds, thereby liberating itself from the stolidity of “old” naturalism and moving towards the supernatural instead. The objective was to regain a spiritual dimension borne by emotion; ”The Return of Poetry” within painting.
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