The Geometry of a Secret

Charles Filiger was the ghost of Pont-Aven. While Gauguin was busy being a loud-mouthed king of the rebels, Filiger was in the corner carving out a silent, terrifying precision. It is 1891 in Brittany. The air smells of wet granite and the old world is dying. The Eiffel Tower is a finished landmark of iron ego. Electricity hums in the distance, but the peasants in the woods still pray to stone saints and wear wooden clogs.

In this climate of nervous premonitions, Filiger produced The Hangman's House. It is a tiny gouache on cardboard that feels massive. He took the rugged landscape and crushed it into flat, crystalline shapes and rigid geometric planes. This isn't a landscape you walk through. It is a landscape you meditate on until it breaks you.

The title suggests a morbid story, but the execution looks like a medieval icon. Filiger wasn't interested in the messy light of the Impressionists. He was hunting for a new and terrifying geometry in the dark. He fractured space nearly twenty years before the Cubists made it a trend. Gauguin called him a genius. The public, naturally, thought he was insane. The work is a folk song played during a nervous breakdown. It captures the feeling of a world moving toward the machine while the soul tries to flee back into the shadows of the forest.

References

Chassé, Charles. The Symbolists. McGraw-Hill, 1969.

Jaworska, Wladyslawa. Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School. New York Graphic Society, 1972.

Boyle-Turner, Caroline. The Pont-Aven School: Gauguin and his Circle in Brittany. Abbeville Press, 1986.