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I chose a drawing among many: Nude Male Seated. Among the many I like by Egon Schiele, the cursed painter who became a cult artist for entire generations of illustrators, artists, and contemporary painters.
Dug out of nothingness, with entire areas filled with white as if corroding a body already slender and affected by an illness that would be fatal to him.
A figure painted with nervous brushstrokes made of yellow, ochre, and black, more intense and alive in the stomach area and gradually darker and gray towards the external limbs. On an almost spectral white background that sublimates any reference to the reality of the setting.
Arms tangled without hands in a moment of intimate self-complacency while the legs betray the immodestly exhibited pose (we are still at the end of the 1800s) supported by expressionless trunks without feet. An almost architectural figure, a kind of cathedral or something very "un" human. A creature no longer even terrestrial. A carcass of flesh and nerves devoured by illness and time, transforming its features into semi-mummified inanimate trunks.
Disturbing figure this, an insane self-portrait of which we are allowed to know very little.
But we do not wish to be curious because we know perfectly well that trying to uncover what lies behind the state of mind of the author of this self-portrait at the exact moment he set out to immortalize it on canvas could mean Hell. An abyss of bleak emotional instability from which it would be difficult to emerge unscathed.
Something that the restless Egon knew all too well, who, incidentally, died shortly thereafter, on October 31, 1918, in Vienna, at only 28 years of age.
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