Odilon Redon could turn even a very ordinary street into something extremely puzzling

The Fries Museum has brought the impressionists from the renovating Boijmans van Beuningen to Leeuwarden. la campaign, is called the sleepover. It’s a beautiful – come, give flowers where they are deserved: beautiful exhibition. Compliments to the people of my heitelân.

It also affects your appreciation of the paintings, such a new presentation. You experience them as strange, as new. It may have to do with the fact that I usually ignore the Impressionists (except Manet and Degas of course), but most of the paintings felt like unseen work. This panel by Odilon Redon (not an impressionist) also looked only vaguely familiar.

It’s the kind of painting you wouldn’t easily put Redon’s (1840-1916) name on. Had they presented it to you blindly, you might not have associated it with him. Redon, they don’t need to tell you that, is best known as a proto-surrealist. He started where Goya left off: queer, nightmarish scenes performed in lithograph or charcoal – Redon called these works noirs† Joris-Karl Huysmans showed in his novel À return his quirky protagonist collect these works of art and describe them in detail. That didn’t hurt the popularity of Redon’s work.

But before that he painted landscapes. This village scene dates from 1875, four years after the Frenchman had fought in the Franco-Prussian War (that of Von Bismarck). It bears witness to a very different kind of enigma than the one we know from Redon’s better-known work. It is the enigma of the ordinary. You view an image devoid of people differently than one full of passers-by and walkers. You look around more casually. You get an eye for things you otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to, such as time. It’s a bit of a personal touch to wonder what time it is with each painting. The question arose here too. The warm, saturated hue of the facades suggests a moment in the morning or afternoon, which is confirmed by the cast shadow that leads into the distance like a crack in an ice field. It’s not extremely short, but it’s not super long either. A real five ‘o clock shadow.

It’s not the only shade. The view is little more than shadows. The shadowed wall, the thin shadows that form the doors and cornices. Any painter worth the blobs of paint on his palette can tell you that shadows aren’t the black spots that cartoonists and amateur painters often like. Nor are they here. Redon’s shadows have color. They are rich in nuances. They are dusty rust against the glare of the street. If you had to walk down that street, you would like to cool off there.

The shadow is also the only thing that indicates any passage of time. If he were not there, we would be looking at a static world. While Redon was painting it (under a little umbrella, I imagine) the real shadow crept slowly to the left, up the house facades, or perhaps to the right, across the street. He would gain more and more ground. In the end, the whole street would be wrapped in it. Only the sky above the buildings would contain some light at that moment. The painter had already packed his things up long ago.