24. Mad King [1981]

Named by Corneliu Baba as "the portrait without a biography", the mad king transcends beyond this title and develops throughout an entire cycle of dedicated works. The artist noted about the subject: "my mad king, in all canvases, is nothing more than the 'poor man' sick, tortured by phantoms and the echoes of the curses of those who were lucky enough to survive his acts of violence and sadism, from the pitiful hour of his horrific glory." The dramatic tension of the subject is constituted, therefore, of quasi-demonic impersonations and unspoken inner apologies. The crownless king becomes an allusion to all the horrors and atrocities that the artist, like so many millions of contemporary people, had to passively watch. Corneliu Baba works consistently, adding reds and grays where he feels necessary. Visually, he starts from Goya's work, and audibly, in the background of the workshop and the work lays Grieg's music – "Peer Gynt". Scared, tortured, in monumental poses or illustrated crawling, on the ground, with his glance bereft of pupils, but with expressive grimaces; with his hands stretched towards an uncertain direction or propped on the ground, the king confined in the grip of his own prison obsessively appears in Corneliu Baba's work beginning with the '70s.

References

The album "Corneliu Baba", published by the Romanian Cultural Institute, Bucharest, 2008. ȘUȘARĂ, Pavel, "Corneliu Baba", published by the Official Monitor, Bucharest, 2013.

Dimensions

width 46 cm, height 47.5 cm

Description

oil on cardboard, signed and dated bottom right, in red, "Baba, (19)81"

Dating

1981

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