Paul Gauguin - Under the Pandanus. I Raro te Oviri 1891

Under the Pandanus 1891
Under the Pandanus. I Raro te Oviri
1891 67x90cm oil/canvas
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas, USA

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From Dallas Museum of Fine Arts:
In Tahiti Gauguin sought an exotic world far from Western civilization, a distant place of brilliant colors, luscious vegetation, and foreign custom. There he found both the real and psychological distance to pursue his radical aesthetic goal of an art that does not copy nature. In "Under the Pandanus," Gauguin suppressed spatial illusionism and instead constructed the landscape with horizontal bands of colors which reinforce the two-dimensionality of the canvas. The figures are dressed in pareos, skirts of flowered cotton wrapped around the waist. The red fabric forms a bold contrast to the brilliant green field to the left, a daring manipulation of complementary colors that is repeated in the fruits balanced on the shoulders of the figure at the right. The reddish brown earth bears a calligraphic pattern of undulating yellow—fallen palm leaves—that gives the impression of hot, molten material.