Natali’s “Beautiful Insanity” Collection (2023): An Analysis
Natali, the web designer of this blog, is an artist based in the Philadelphia area. She is a daughter of the post-modern art movement, dropping the grand narratives and embracing the peripheries. The human experience, colored by phenomenon and subjectivity, has become fractured, schizophrenic, and without true identity. I’m going to use “schizophrenic” in a Deuleuzian sense here, as Gilles Deleuze uses in the philosophy book Anti-Oedipus. Yes, it’s not how our hyper bio-medicalized world uses the phrase, but stick with me here. I’m just going to use it to mean a more fractured identity in a capitalist system.
Her latest collection done in 2023, the “Beautiful Insanity” series first shows a title piece of the same name that explores the Deleuzian theme of the fractured person— a woman with different features, but unable to be seen as whole. The dissociative feelings evoked by Beautiful Insanity raise the question of how to grapple with the loss of identity in the post-modern age.
Death in the Eye expresses her influence of the chiaroscuro techniques of the Baroque era; its dramatic play with light and shadow thematically parallels the innate struggle with mortality that afflicts us all. The blue eye itself was inspired by her father, who experienced a life-threatening emergency at the time she completed the work. It signifies the generational trauma of loss directly gripping the viewer and herself. The birthday cake is a contemporary flair to ironically point out the juxtaposition between celebrating getting older, while culturally the fear of death and dying remains arguably taboo.
Where Was Eye, an experimental work exploring common fears, such as insects and social judgment from others, is a study of body symmetry and color. It derives inspiration from surrealist themes and artists like Salvador Dali. It follows the theme of the fractured person— one trying to find beauty in interacting with a sensory world filled with judging gazes and creepy crawling insects.
Her most current work, Transcending, is also a study of color and using the canvas to create an illusion of contrast. The woman depicted, colored by the world, has an aura above her head to show an awakening. Thematically, it is also evocative of dissociation from identity. Living as a fractured person without identity in the sensory world, she must transcend.
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