Preamble
The selection of works is always guided by my personal, so that no work is offered that I would not acquire for myself. Art has been a part of my life since childhood. It is clear to me that man does not live by bread alone and that art is also a source of life. With a doctorate in art history, I’m able to give the works on display the attention they deserve, thus combining my passion with my profession.
Dr Martin Kirves
Philosophy
Arcadia has perished! Arcadia is both the lost Golden Age of ancient bucolic poetry and the closed Garden of Eden. A place of longing, inaccessible from this side, which only the imagination can open and art can present.
In his powerful painting, Et in arcadia ego (1638-1640), Niclas Poussin depicts this place of longing and at the same time confronts the viewer with the end of the idyll depicted: "Et in arcadia ego" - "Even in Arcadia, there am I" - is written on the massive sarcophagus. Arcadia is not destroyed by an external event; death is inherent to it.
In keeping with the ancient belief that the living enter the realm of the dead as shadows, the young shepherd points to the shadow cast on the tombstone in the evening light and looks up in horror at the woman standing beside him.
As death drags the shepherds, and ultimately Arcadia itself, into ruin, the landscape of longing is indelibly marked by melancholy. Yet melancholy is precisely the productive force of art that led to the creation of this painting. The cast shadow is not only an allegory of death, it is also the legendary origin of art, as Eduard Daege shows in his painting The Invention of Painting (1832).
Pliny the Elder tells us that a Corinthian woman drew a silhouette on the wall of her lover who was going abroad, so that the absent person would remain present. In this way, art transforms the shadow from a form of death into a form of life, which Daege intensifies by showing the lover marching towards death as a soldier. In Daege's work, the young beauty is not melancholy, but filled with love as she contemplates the living form of art she has created.
In order to represent her lover as accurately as possible, she chose the strict profile, thus giving his face an ideal 'eternal form'. The standing woman in Poussin's painting is the only figure in the picture to be shown in a strict profile. She is also distinguished from the shepherds by her lightly incarnate parts and her gender. Her posture and clothing are clearly inspired by ancient statues. In this figure, Poussin formulates an ideal produced by his art, which is why the woman should be seen as an allegory of painting. She transforms the dead form of the shadow on the sarcophagus into the fullness of the life form of art, which is timeless in its ideality. She transforms death into life and therefore lays her hand on the frightened young shepherd to calm his fear.
Arcadia may have perished, but its demise led to the rise of art. For its part, art creates an Arcadia which, because of its real inaccessibility, is a melancholy place of longing. Pictorially, however, the Arcadia of art - as Daege's painting demonstrates - has something fulfilling about it. Art is a refuge that is not of this world and yet remains related to the world, which is also emphasised by Daege's visualisation of the real absent lover. Because it is related to the world, art opens up a space for reflection and meditation that can also have a worldly effect.
Arcadia Art primarily offers works that reveal the Arcadian dimension of art. As the Corinthian woman's longing gaze at the silhouette of her beloved makes clear, eros, in its ambivalence of desire and fulfilment, is also an important moment in Arcadian art, represented in the gallery's works.
However, since art is fundamentally Arcadian in its difference from the world, works are also presented whose content does not have an Arcadian characteristic. Their selection is based on the creation of a substantial artistic idea, realised through a quality execution.
In Arcadia Art, canonised artists meet artists who are no longer as much in the limelight, but who were highly regarded in their day and are waiting to be rediscovered. In the broad fields outside the respective canonisations, too, the search is on for artistic quality to be made visible. In doing so, the demarcation between tradition and modernity has no validity.
The selection of works is always guided by the personal view of the gallery owner, Dr Martin Kirves, so that no work is offered that he would not acquire for himself. Art has been a part of his life since childhood. It is clear to him that man does not live by bread alone and that art is also a source of life. With a doctorate in art history, he is able to give the works on display the attention they deserve, thus combining his passion with his profession.
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