Cézanne’s Matrix
Paul Cézanne was a recluse; his best friends were his apples. Every six months, he escaped to Aix-en-Provence, where he grew up, got an education, and befriended Zola. Their walks in the woods alongside their several friends still live in Cézanne’s multitude of bathers. And in the multitude of apples lives his friendship with Zola. The latter has been bullied in their school, and Paul shielded Emile. The next day, he received a big basket of apples in gratitude. We should all be thankful for this thought.
Rilke on Cézanne: “After all works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end to where no one can go any further. the further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible definitive utterance of this singularity…. therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the everturning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere necessity as reality as existence.”
In his apples, Cézanne transcended his self, just as did Caravaggio in his dark scenes or as did Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Cézanne rose above his canvas, above nature, he contemplated the pure form. Plato’s idea of a form.
by Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani