The Office of Evening 1971

Paul Delvaux painted “The Office of Evening” with oil on canvas, and there’s a certain stillness to it, isn't there? A staged-ness... The dark palette feels like an interior space, almost like a theater, yet there's the landscape of evening in the background. The surface looks smooth, carefully blended, like a dream, maybe a repressed one. I imagine Delvaux slowly building up those translucent layers of paint, almost glazing, each layer influencing the next, like a memory that keeps shifting. He’s thinking hard. The women are reading, a flautist is playing, but what does it all mean? How does each of these subjects and the spaces in-between relate to one another? Delvaux must have looked closely at Surrealism, and yet he’s doing something else here. It’s not just about dreams or the unconscious, but also about the structure and geometry of painting, the careful orchestration of figures and space, and how painting can reveal the human condition. We get to learn something about the world and our place in it through the act of painting.