Ecce Homo 1949

Paul Delvaux painted this compelling and strange oil on canvas, Ecce Homo, with a melancholic palette. The composition must have emerged slowly, layer upon layer, as Delvaux built up this bizarre scene of skeletons in a cityscape at night. I am thinking about what it must have felt like for Delvaux to paint this. Did he start with the architecture, building up the ghostly atmosphere? Or did he begin with the figures, each one carefully posed in their skeletal stillness? The way he drapes the figures in colored cloth, the folds and shadows hinting at a hidden weight, is really striking. Look at the figure on the left, draped in blue, gesturing with its hand. The angle of the bones seems to emphasize the gesture. The conversation that Delvaux enters into is like a kind of echo chamber. Artists are always picking up on each other, borrowing motifs, or responding to history. Delvaux, and other artists, remind me of painting's remarkable capacity to hold space for all that is uncertain and ambiguous.