Edward Hopper
Morning Sun

THE REVIEW

Edward Hopper paints scenes of daily life that possess the same characteristics as a lunar landscape. His figures are plastic, yet crystallized in an immobility that seems eternal. The atmosphere is palpable, but antiseptic, as if all the air had been sucked out of the composition. The climate is dense, but unlivable in its deoxygenation. The subjects seem almost mummified, endowed with seemingly plastic properties, but in reality, inanimate in a sinister imposture.

The lights and architectural shapes cut the painting diagonally, giving it a regular but restless morphology, as if a gigantic hand were ready at any moment to break into the micro-universe of the composition, crumpling it like a dollhouse. The girl seems stable in her position but at the same time fragile and uneasy, somewhat resigned, and somewhat waiting. It is just an apparent calm of the early morning, suspended in a numbness that could be overturned at any moment.

These are micro-worlds that have a clearly defined beginning and end, and they do not give the impression of any escape route, a perspective that projects us beyond. On the contrary, there is a perspective, but it is a closed perspective, projected onto nothingness. One can gaze far into the distance, but nothing seems to change, even beyond the ghostly factory in the background. A cosmic void, where one can get lost, and where the protagonist of the painting, as in many other Hopper's works, seems already lost.

The lack of references gives a sense of alienation that perhaps she too seems to perceive, in a veil of residual humanity hidden beneath a disturbing and flat facial morphology. They are faces pushed to the limit of inexpressiveness, which apparently say nothing.

Perhaps Hopper is simply a bad painter, but if he were a better painter, he probably wouldn't be such a great artist.