Filiger, Charles - Virgin and Two Angels (1895)

The Sacred Math of a Brittany Hermit

Charles Filiger didn’t care about your perspective or about the three-dimensional world that most painters were obsessed with at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1895 he was already deep into the woods of Brittany living like a drug-addicted monk and painting things that looked like they fell out of a time machine. He was a favorite of the occultists at the Salon de la Rose+Croix but he belonged to no one.

Gauguin called him a genius because Filiger understood that reality is a lie. In Virgin and Two Angels he takes the divine and flattens it into something sharp and geometric. It’s a tiny painting, only ten inches across, but it carries the weight of a cathedral. He used gouache and gold to mimic the look of medieval stained glass but the result was something entirely new. He was doing geometric abstraction decades before the modernists figured out the trick.

The heavy outlines and flat colors create a sense of stillness that’s almost uncomfortable. The Virgin is not a soft mother, she’s a series of deliberate shapes. The angels are icons of a different order. Filiger was a man out of time who rejected the salons and the noise for a quiet life of isolation and addiction. He died in 1928 but he left behind these small windows into a world where math and mysticism collide. It’s not pretty in a conventional sense. It is haunting and precise, the work of a man who saw the bones of the universe and decided they looked like stained glass.

References

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

Pincus-Witten, Robert. Occult Symbolism in France: Josephin Peladan and the Salons de la Rose+Croix. New York: Garland, 1976.

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