Chirico Quotes & Sayings

Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics. — Dumitru Tepeneag

If a work of art is to be truly immortal, it must pass quite beyond the limits of the human world, without any sign of common sense and logic. In this way the work will draw nearer to dream and to the mind of a child. — Giorgio De Chirico

Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life. — Giorgio De Chirico

When I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful. — Giorgio De Chirico

It is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense of itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view ... should speak so strongly in us ... that we feel compelled to paint ... — Giorgio De Chirico

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams. — Giorgio De Chirico

We must hold enormous faith in ourselves. — Giorgio De Chirico

Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est? ("What shall I love if not the enigma?") — Giorgio De Chirico

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness. — Giorgio De Chirico

I believe, however, that such abnormal moments can be found in everyone, and it is all the more fortunate when they occur in individuals with creative talent or with clairvoyant powers. — Giorgio De Chirico

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men. — Giorgio De Chirico

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything. — Dana Schutz

There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world. — Giorgio De Chirico

Oh, stop it, I tell myself. Stop looking for links and meaning and explanations. What did De Chirico say? The world is a museum of strangeness. — Kirsty Eagar

I stepped out of the shower and dried my hair, rubbed on body lotion, cleaned my ears. Then to the kitchen to heat up the last of the coffee. Only to discover: no one sitting at the opposite side of the table. Staring at that chair where no one sat, I felt like a tiny child in a De Chirico painting, left behind all alone in a foreign country. — Haruki Murakami

It used to be that painters were crazy and sculptors clever. Today it's the other way around. — Giorgio De Chirico

So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. "Well, well!" we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi's, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke. — Tennessee Williams

Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests. — Dumitru Tepeneag

Everything has two aspects; the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. — Giorgio De Chirico