$12,000

Artwork Description

A Dionysian depiction of being alone, together in a dancing trance. In The birth of Tragedy Nietzsche speaks of two drives in the human condition. The first drive, the Apollonian, represents the drive towards order, reason, militarism, and the Self. Namely, the structuration of the ego through every means available and also an appropriation of the world through neurotic symbolism. The second drive, the Dyonisian, represents chaos, intoxication, nothingness, sexual and romantic love, altered states of consciousness, and the connection to the unconscious Big Other. Both drives reveal an emotional mood-like dimension, which can translate to a painting or a song. Kitty sought meticulously to brush this painting with the gift of philosophy and art history. She paints through Dyonisian references of the god of wine from different epochs like with the first notable character usually referred to in Latin as Bacchus (Roman Dyonisus). However, this is not a simple drawing of Bacchus. In this drawing Kitty reminisces Raphael’s commissioned painting finished by Titian called Bacchus and Ariadne finished in 1523. Kitty’s next reference is a painting which defies sculpture as a discipline; she portrays the sculptural piece by the French 18th century sculptor Clodian of a Bacchante Woman, also known as Maenads, or worshipers of Dionysus. Her final reference within the Glastonbury party is a smaller yet fundamental figure in the painting that connects Kitty with Nietzsche and with a Mesoamerican turn; namely, Xochipili, whose role is to be the prince of flowers, the god of love, of games, of beauty, of pleasure and the sacred drunkenness of pulque. The warmth of the work in both colour and topic gives us a sense of freedom. There is a cosmic oneness expressed in the Dyonisian painting and it takes over us.