Parallelism n.d.

Felicien Rops created this etching titled "Parallelism," sometime before his death in 1898. The composition immediately draws us in with its central figure, a winged sphinx. Rops' masterful use of line and shadow gives the piece an ethereal quality. The sphinx is bisected, human and animal. The artist uses line and shadow, and the way he uses it is remarkable. There is a tension in the composition, a kind of visual paradox between the human and the beast. This parallelism between the sacred and profane, beauty and the grotesque, challenges established categories. Rops invites us to question the fixed boundaries of our understanding. The sphinx becomes a symbol of the instability of meaning itself, where clear answers are elusive. This encourages continuous interpretation, shaped by our own experiences.