Giorgio de Chirico created one of the first of these invented worlds and one of the most enduring. Before the word surrealism was invented he anticipated many of its devices without crossing the line into its later conventions of morbidity and sensationalist shock value. He painted combinations and recombinations of a limited set of motives that, despite the use of repetition between his different paintings, they do remain undiminished in their sense of mystery and melancholy all glazed with an ominous foreboding that is dampened by a serenity that is pervasive and somehow reassuring.
de Chirico’s world contains a unified paradox of being both desolate and intimate, empty but loaded with suggestion, vacuous, yet charged with mysterious presences. It is a world that is never explained and is part of the reason it continues to fascinate through a basculation, a gyration between volatile themes of metaphysics and fatality mingling with destiny, torment and dream.
The van in Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is empty. Why? In The Anguish of Departure the van doors are closed. What do they hide? What is perplexing is the challenge of rationalizing the presence of the van or the disposition and relationship of any of the objects in a Chirico painting on any kind of basis founded on logic and reason, despite the reality of their existence.
Call it an irrefutable illogic that accounts for this equilibrium between the disturbing and serene that conveys the power inherent in romantic painting if its emotionalization from the lyrical to the violent can be captured in spirit and palatable in the form of a dreamscape like with Chirico, the unexpected passages of dream in the form of dreamscapes breaking through the more pedestrian course of a work that jettisons the intellectual in favour of the spontaneous.