Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe

James Ensor, The Skate, 1892.

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, The Ray, 1728

Ken Currie, Tragic Form (Skate), 2014

Ken Currie, Tragic Forms No. 6, 2014

Self-Portrait with a Visor, Jean-Simeon Chardin, 1776

Les Osselets (The game of knucklebones), Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, 1734

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1771) - Self portrait

This is crazy

Soap Bubbles - Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin // Mood Ring - Lorde

The Ray (La raie), 1728 by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin

The at once passionate and aggressive touch that brought forth The Ray has another, sexual dimension. It is hard to ignore that if the cavity of the fish is an image of a voracious mouth, half-devoured and devouring, it also comes across as a gruesome visual fantasy of a genital organ. For an eighteenth century viewer this association was put on the table, so to speak, from the start, by the very name of this still life's protagonist, la raie, which in the period's common parlance referred to female genitals. The way Chardin painted the fish played up its connotations as a sexually charged image of mutilated and mutilating femininity that reveals itself as a fantasy of an injured masculinity, an image of male risk. For from the depth of this ghastly image of a bodily wound suggestive of a female organ rise up pendulous elongated forms that evoke a male body. This sexually suggestive and bi-gendered interpretation of the ray, a standard motif of seventeenth-century Flemish still lifes, recurs in Chardin's early work, notably in Cat with Ray, Oysters, Pitcher, and Loaf of Bread of 1728. Although the fish, suspended from a hook, is shown in profile, its gutted orifice is in full view, a product of a brush that seems to have been particularly interested in conveying its gory aspect. Here the orifice is nestled in an oval shape produced by vigorous slashes of red and white pigment that form something disturbingly close to the shape of a vulva exhibiting its wounds. Rendered in vivid red, the pendant forms that appear below the orifice-similar to the shiny tubular vesicle at the center of The Ray's cavity-place masculinity at the core of this genital spectacle. What these spectacular renditions of mutilated organs amount to is an anxious vision of femininity as a domain of male self-identification, a vision that speaks of both a loving attachment to and a violent repulsion of the female body as a site of subjective self-definition. - The Painter's Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard by Ewa Lajer-Burchart

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Good Education, ca. 1753, oil/canvas (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Chardin’s still lives @ Louvre

Le bocal d’olives, 1760

Le gobelet d’argent, 1768

Lemme tell you about my favorite French artist whom I'd never heard of until I took a painting class.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was born in 1699 during the later reign of Louis XIV, he of Versailles fame.

At the time, Hyacinth Regard paints like

and Chardin's contemporary Jean Honoré Fragonard is like

And another contemporary, François Boucher, is like

And Chardin is like

Fck👏this👏French👏Baroque👏Bullshit

and becomes the master of still life.

I appreciate them a lot more after seeing what he was rebelling against.

Also he did genre paintings of kitchen scenes and ordinary people

and he painted himself and his second wife all frumpy

and occasiomally he parodied Very Serious Art by substituting a monkey.

anyway that's my boy Chardin. Shitpainter of the French Royal Académie. He taught me glazing and i love him.

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

Chardin

Lys and I went to Spain last week and I wanted to report that Spain’s art museums have some Quality Old Cat Pics

The Monkey Painter

Pierre-Louis de Surugue (French, 1716-1772) after Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (French, 1699-1779)

"Relation Véridique des Aventures Etranges de la Châtelaine de By et de son Page dans la Soirée du Mardi 3 Mai de l'Année 1870" bande-dessinée illustrée par Rosa Bonheur et Paul Chardin à la plume, encre et lavis (1870) à l'exposition "Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)” au Musée d'Orsay, novembre 2022.