The illusionary world of the cave

Image source: painting by Marko Stout

Here is special cave, in fact a website of the contemporary New York City artist Marko Stout, named ‘The Cave’, which you may like to enter. I love it and visited it many times.

Interestingly, the artist Stout holds a degree in biology and doctorates in metaphysics and medicine. Though Dr. Stout may not accept it, I find the influence of his knowledge and experience in biology and medicine, equally complemented by his philosophical quests, in most of his works, whether it is in the forms of mutilated human organs or, the X-ray vision of the bones, nerves, etc. He has aptly called his art site the ‘The Cave’ because, in his own view, the cave is not real but an illusion.

The first impression that I get is that art has neither any definition nor any language or borders. And art need not portray the near photo-realistic depiction of subjects as you find in the works of the 19th century French Academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Nor does art need the distorted figures and images that the Cubist Picasso and the later modernists and post-modernists projected in their typically compartmentalized versions of art.

To me, art is something that makes me stay riveted to what is displayed before me, and what sends signals to my brain to make me think. If art cannot achieve this end, I feel it does not have anything particular to convey to the viewers. From this point of view, the art of Dr. Stout is something special, as it deviates and rejects all established concepts and schools of art. Look at the painting reproduced above, an untitled painting found on The Cave.