Mythotony 1942

Victor Brauner’s “Mythotony” is a painting, probably made with oils, that lives in a bifurcated world of dark and light, the subconscious and the conscious. I can imagine Brauner shifting forms around, trying to put together this puzzle of heads and bodies. It makes me think about how when you're painting, you're not just representing something, you're actually building it, like a Frankenstein. You have these pieces, maybe borrowed from different places or ideas, and you're stitching them together with color and line. Here, the colors are muted, a mix of browns, oranges, and purples, giving the painting a dreamlike quality. The shapes are rounded and slightly distorted, which adds to the unsettling feeling. Look at that figure on the left, made of stacked faces, each with its own expression. Are they different aspects of the same person, or separate entities altogether? It reminds me of the way Picasso was also fragmenting forms and showing multiple viewpoints at once. Ultimately, painting is just an embodied form of inquiry.