12. novembre 2005
Gottfried Helnwein's "Untitled" (2005), oil and acrylic on canvas, features an unsettling dreamlike encounter.
In one large painting, a girl sits on the edge of a bed in a barren room, staring into space. A giant blue rabbit with sightless insect eyes stands before her, clad in some sort of military garb. Despite their proximity, the two figures seem to occupy different dimensions. The frightful effect of the rabbit figure appears to register more in us than in the child whose vision we may be spying on.
The vaguely erotic menace of the rabbit figure flares in another untitled picture in which a sort of Mad Hatter figure, all in yellow and masked, leans in to touch a sleeping girl with a gloved hand.
For all the pictures' realism and their echoes of Lewis Carroll, they evoke psychological rather than literal monstrosity: the betrayal of innocence by imagination as well as reality.
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