Courtesy of 'Beyond Van Gogh'
4/12/2021 - Beyond Van Gogh - Miami - RodrigoGaya.com/@Gayaman_photo/Gayaman Visual Studio
The yellow and white lights unfurl from swirling circles projected on the walls, streaking, comet-like, to fill the space. I’m standing in the middle of a vast room inside a shed constructed in a corner of the parking lot at the Saint Louis Galleria mall. But I might as well be in southern France, staring out a window at the black cypress trees and celestial bodies that illuminate the sky. I’m inside Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, part of the exhibit Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, opening Friday.
Created by Normal Studio, based in Montreal, Beyond Van Gogh is an audio-visual exhibit that uses projection technology to shed new light on the life and works of the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist, who found success only posthumously. Van Gogh’s works are presented on a massive scale—and they come to life, moving, melting, swirling across the walls. The images are often paired with the artist’s own writing. "Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures," he wrote in 1882.
The idea of adding motion to Van Gogh works was a natural fit, says curator Fanny Curtat. The artist was known for his use of complementary oranges, golds, and blues, and the application of the bright colors in dabs often creates the illusion of movement. “When you look at an original on the wall, the color is already leaping toward you, and the movement is so present,” Curtat says. “We tend to remember the movement, for example in Starry Night, way before anything that has to do with the landscape, we remember that glowing sky. It was all about finding these moments that allow you to just breathe new life into a work that's already very much alive.”
The show also seeks to dispel a bit of the darkness that surrounds the artist. Van Gogh struggled financially—he didn’t achieve commercial success during his lifetime—as well as socially, emotionally, and mentally. He desperately wanted to start a brotherhood of like-minded artists after meeting Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and Pointillists in Paris. He persuaded the Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles, in the South of France, to paint. But tempers flared. We only have Gauguin’s account, but it was that Van Gogh came at him with a knife. In any event, Van Gogh mutilated his own ear and then checked himself into an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
But he still painted. Van Gogh’s younger brother, Theo, was his champion, floating him monetarily and buoying his spirits by writing letters. Theo saved his brother Vincent’s responses, and after the brothers died—Vincent first, of suicide, in 1890, at age 37, and Theo six months later—Theo’s widow translated the letters from Dutch to English. (They are now part of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, and you can read them online.) Excerpts from the correspondence appear on display before entering the exhibit, and particularly relevant words are included with the images.
Amanda Woytus
Three projections in 'Beyond Van Gogh'
In the room where Van Gogh’s art is projected, the approximately 30-minute cycle of paintings opens with drawings of grayish homes in a streetscape, and animated black birds flap across the top of the wall. The scene gives way to one with more color, but it’s muted and not as vibrant as the works we normally associate with Van Gogh. In one corner, a windmill’s sails circle lazily. The scenes are blotted with brown dots—pointillism—and then dabs of color appear. They form a green trellis climbing up a salon, the canopy of a tree. Brown spreads over the walls, creating a blank canvas. Pen marks start to fill in one of the artist’s sketches, a landscape that Van Gogh would later paint. Most people would leave a blue sky in a sketch blank. Van Gogh knew he wanted a blue so intense, he had to represent it in the sketch. He fills in the area with a series of horizontal dashes. Then, the animation pours in the color, so deep blue it’s almost purple. We see the artist’s house with the green shutters (The Yellow House), where he cut off his ear.
We are in Arles now, the bursts of orange and gold bringing to life The Sower. In Starry Night Over the Rhône, the reflection from the heavenly bodies shimmers on the water as Miles Davis’ lonely horn wails. Portraits appear. They blink their eyes and shift their heads before morphing into still lifes of flowers, which are anything but still, actually—they burst forth and spill onto the floor.
From here, we transition into the birth of Van Gogh’s nephew, his namesake, and beautiful almond blossoms bloom from an excerpt from a letter from Theo. It reads: “As we told you, we’ll name him after you, and I’m making the wish that he may be as determined and courageous as you.” The animated blossoms eventually float away in an imperceptible wind, swirling around the viewer and creating a botanical disco ball–like effect before revealing scenes of a farm. Starry Night is next, which features the most spectacular animation of the exhibit.
The soundtrack, which features modern music, acts as a bridge between the 19th century, when Van Gogh lived, and today. Also acting as a commonality is the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Van Gogh created Starry Night while staring out the window of his cell in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, to place yourself inside the painting is to pretend you’re in isolation as well—except with the events of the past two years, maybe we don’t have to try too hard to imagine what that’s like.
“After all that we've been going through, even though he never knew the pandemic, there's something even more relevant about him today,” Curtat says. “We were all cooped up inside for the longest time, and travel was complicated, and work was complicated. We all struggled. And then you have somebody who did struggle but managed to transcend all of this pain and hardship into works of art.”
Tickets for Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience range from $24.99–$93.99 with group rates available. Children under age 4 are free. Reservations and masks are required. Visit the exhibit's website for more information.
