The Brooklyn Rail

A horizontal landscape moves from blue sky on the left to a sunset on the right. It is a painful sensation of time passing and maybe a memory of childhood. And in the midst of this, Roman nosed people are acting out stuff. It’s a parody of a memory, a parody of a sentiment, it’s a child misunderstanding the present. Imagine hiring a theatrical crew to act out your past. The place feels real but the things that happened are acted out by costumed actors. I think this is Nicolas Poussin’s way of portraying the inaccessibility of childhood, the inaccessibility of your past and the inaccessibility of a culture’s past as well. That’s why it’s always Arcadia instead of his actual childhood, it’s the childhood of a civilization.

Contemporary life is always a disappointment. There is always this golden thing from before. Poussin looked around and said “this sucks.” He couldn’t find a paintable picture in contemporary life, so he imagined this golden lost world. I think that’s in some way a portrayal of the rushing away of childhood as one ages. This nostalgia is a critique of the present, and it’s also rage against the past, a lament that the past is gone and can never really be understood. It’s as hopeless as an old person portraying childhood, or a child portraying old age. It’s the unknowability of any other state but the one you are in. You are old, you can’t imagine being young. You are young, you can’t imagine being old, but you long for the other thing that you can’t have. In some ways we’ve created this dilemma for ourselves with the phones where we constantly reject the place we are in for some other place that’s on our phone. We’re waiting in line, we look at our phone. We are at a restaurant, we look at our phone. We reject the place we are in for the appeal of something that’s not our world. I think that was partly what Poussin was doing—he was creating a world to forget his disenchantment, impatience, and hatred of the world that he was in. The Roman nosed faces aggressively mean nothing in Poussin, we see them like the kids in a Charlie Brown cartoon hear adults talking with that “wah wah wah” sound. They are intentionally masks expressing nothing. The only real face is the unseen painter’s face.