Salut 1938

Paul Delvaux made "Salut" using oil paint on canvas and the result is undeniably strange. There's something deeply unsettling about the smooth, almost porcelain-like finish, combined with the stark, dreamlike clarity of the scene. Look at the woman's back, the rendering is so tight, so controlled. You can almost feel the cool detachment in each brushstroke. The color palette is similarly restrained, dominated by muted earth tones and the occasional flash of crimson. What I notice is that he doesn't blend the colors, almost like a coloring book. What is so cool, is how this strange, uncanny landscape seems to hover between realism and something more psychological. He captures that feeling when you wake up and it takes you a minute to understand where you are. Delvaux shares the same kind of psychological space as someone like Giorgio de Chirico, who also played with unsettling juxtapositions and dreamlike imagery. Like with art, life can also embrace ambiguity and multiple interpretations over fixed meanings.