La Raya CHARDIN 3 de 4

And as one moves away, the object is created and ends up belonging to nature. Sometimes it also likes almost equally both close and far. The chromatic range of the line looks like the narrow principle. A dominant of ocher brown. When the details are analyzed, it is discovered that in fact, by the game of the fusion of the brushstrokes, several paints concur in the colored effects. Green for the leeks or the jar. Brown for the plate, the mortar and the spice box. Blueish gray for the blade blade and some shadows. Yellow ocher for the thin parts of the line or the cork cap. The tablecloth, the cat's hair and the skin of the line form lighter spots that stand out on the dark backgrounds. The white of the line is mixed with gray and worked over with a greenish gray layer and ocher to give it that characteristic naked look of the fish's inner skin. The color of the bleeding flesh is already in the center with the visceral cavity. Discreet echoes of this great red tear, a bloodstain on the fin and marks on the knife handle. The same reddish-red but more attenuated is used for the bottle of wine, the copper of the saucepan and the warm color of the wall in the background. In a painting like the line, the disposition is not enough to explain the attraction of the viewer. At first glance, Chardin brings together the elements of a meal. The animal represented is a curved line, recognizable by its nose less pointed than the other species of line and by its curved scales. The painting evokes, therefore, the kitchen, a place where fundamental separations seem to be made. The raw and the cooked, the solid and the liquid, the salty and the sugary, the fat and the lean, the animal and the vegetable, the fish and the goat meat. The image marks well a form of separation distinguishing the living on the left and the inanimate on the right, what is eaten and drunk in the center and what is used to cook or to eat in one place and another. And between what is eaten, what is eaten raw, the oysters, and what is eaten cooked, the fish. In Catholic countries, meat was not eaten on Fridays, only fish. And the show proposed is then the food that is made on the day of the death of Christ. It is also in the kitchen where some transgressions are authorized. To prepare the food, it is necessary to do before to pass the food from the state of repugnant objects to that of edible food, to clean the dirty vegetables from the ground, to kill and bleed the birds, to desoil the floor of the house, to empty the vases, to scrape the scales. All these dirty activities preserve a part of the savagery that makes the kitchen a little sacred place. Anyway, a place reserved for women, where the kitchen attracts children. And there is Chardin, painter of childhood and adolescence, a remnant of that naive look that attributes the unusual instruments of the kitchen to family or particular personalities. The utensils are gathered in respectful circles around the imposing copper bridge. Or, they seem to run through the remains of a meal. Or they are overloaded with reflections. The disturbing knife has not only the role of pictorial illusion, present in almost all paintings, it recalls its malefic power. It is the one that cuts, grinds, desoils, the one that can kill. Caught as he wandered by the subjective force of the line, another painter, Marcel Proust, read there precisely this personalization of the objects. Come now to the kitchen, whose entrance is serenely guarded by the tribe of the glasses of all greatness. Capable and faithful, laborious and beautiful race. On the table, the active knives that go straight to the white rest in a threatening and harmless leisure. But above you, a strange monster, fresh as the sea where they waved, is suspended a line whose view mixes the desire for gluttony, the curious charm of calm or the storms of the sea of which he was a formidable witness, making it feel like a memory of the garden of plants through a restaurant dish. It is open and you can admire the beauty of its delicate and vast architecture, dyed with red blood, blue nerves and white muscles like the ship of a polychrome cathedral. On one side, in the abandonment of his death, the fish are twisted in a rigid and desperate curve with their eyes coming out. Then, a cat, superimposing in this aquarium the dark life of its wisest and most conscious forms, the lightning of its eyes poses on the line, makes the velvet of its legs on the open oysters and discovers at the same time the prudence of its character, the greed of its palate and the fear of surprise. The eye that loves to play with other senses and reconstitute with the help of some colors more than a whole past, a whole future, feels the freshness of the oysters that are going to wet the cat's legs and hears already at the moment when the precarious clutching of its fragile legs will bend under the weight of the cat the little scream of its stone and the thunder of its fall. The cat is the only living being of the picture. It is a threat. Everyone knows that he likes fish raw or cooked and without a doubt also the oysters. Family animal that he likes is, however, a little witch. In the middle of the night he meets the devil he is the one who destroys the beautiful order of the objects ordered by the painter. He is a young, disobedient and naughty cat. He literally puts his feet on the plate. The stingray is an animal that gives fear. Its fins look like wings. It seems to fly under the water. It is classified among the most dangerous sea monsters in ancient imagery. Skillful artisans used the wings the tail, the skeleton and the dry skin of certain rays to make mummies of mermaids basilisks or other mythological beings that adorned the cabinets of curiosities. Next to these monsters the real stingray often appeared there. Also in the encyclopedia there is a picture of a very fantastic being. Before Chardin other painters had shown the fish.