BAROQUE
PSYCHOLOGICAL
SATIRE
&
POETRY
The Nourishment Art Screams For
heavenward
/ˈhɛvnwəd/
literary
adjective
directed or moving towards heaven or the sky; upward.
adverb
towards heaven or the sky; upward.
My work stands within a rich tradition of the baroque, psychological satire and poetry—a tradition dedicated to the unflinching excavation of the human soul. In a hypermodern world that often prizes the placid over the profound, this vital lineage is sometimes misconstrued as excessive or outdated. Yet, it is precisely this unvarnished richness that art now screams for.
I create vivid scenes of human folly painted with exuberant colors and grotesque contours because life is that way. I am merely honest. Despite the many changes of the modern world and its corporate parlance of pseudo-olympianism, of “it’s alright, Jack”, human suffering and brokenness are more widespread and shrill than ever. Perhaps, particularly, because this age, a blip though it is in the totality of the planet’s history, has accelerated malformations in the adaptations of an organism that was once allowed to adapt slowly, over long stretches of time. Since industrialisation we are asked to adapt every five years, and more tragically, to bin in the abyss of Time everything that tied us to our past, everything that served us over millions of years in the raw jungle.
We are expected to be soulless. We are expected to pretend. To be bland.
My style, in contrast, assumes that the soul is worth painting with gold and ruin, not Ikea white.
We are also expected to waltz neurotically around each other’s folly. To self censor to exhaustion lest we pierce with truth the thin membranes of others’ egoes, floating unmoored like soap bubbles in the sky. Our whole Western human experience has become this — and art, now a subsidy of Corp. Intl., plays a role in it. Art no longer awakens nor aligns the soul with truth and beauty; it no longer corrects through placing a mirror before folly. Instead, it creates tiny irrelevant padded rooms tailored to each “consumer” individually, flattering the mediocre, flattening the landscape.
By reclaiming rich emotional registers and unflinching satire — the mirror to society that aims to improve it — I stand against this tide. By awakening maps in our brain that accurately correspond to the complexity in reality, I resist the impoverishment of soul and minds in our era. By upholding tradition, I rescue the soul — for what is the soul if not our memories, and what is tradition if not collective memory?
Tradition is the soul of humanity. Art is its window towards the Universe and a ladder to tomorrow.
The current wave is a one way road to a mass perishing; a cult of Thanatos leading to a cultural extinction. A man in worship of his navel will dissolve inside himself. The society that only has hands to feed its mouth but reflects not at all, is destined to perish.
This is my ethos and it should be that of us all who love the world and do not want its beauty culled.
Let’s all once more gaze heavenward.
The Artist
Mara Rotundo