Why I am like a Braque painting

Why I am like a Braque Painting

I like Braque. He was the analytical Cubist and continued to be so well into the synthetic phase and farther on when others allowed Cubism to delve into realms of Surrealism, including Picasso, whose shapes became a spectacle of fanciful forms and traces of what Cubism had been, now painted merely as Modernist icons with no real Modernist significance. Braque continues to pay attention to the dynamics of a composition well after others had made a farce of Cubism. He paid attention to special relationships and volume of the form within those relationships, as a room for example, where, and this is well into the 20’s, he still focused on the perspective of the viewer on this very blatantly artificial setting, this art setting that is a stage to challenge norms of special dynamics from the analytical eye of the viewer, witnessing the piece, not for any sort of representation but to examine these formulas and the malleability of the literal, or the absence of the literal, or absolute.
But back in the second decade of the cacophonous twentieth century, we see these elements manifest early in Braque’s early work, like the early Picasso, placing in that very two dimensional range of artifice, all that is deep, made up in short, of bodily planes, angles and perspectives of every sort, locked into this two-dimensional artificial reality, the reality that was almost a proof that art by its very two-dimensional, painterly nature could indeed house fathoms, multitude of depth and perspectival recessions and contradictions in the mode which is art, free, honest, true to its very nature as an artificial avatar yet able to contain the vicissitudes of a guitar player or a café table with all of the dimension that one might find in a piece by Velasquez or Manet.
Why I am like Braque painting is due to the artifice of the world and my own placement in it. That shallow plane is the reality of society, the expectations, limitations, demands and ironies that potentially “frame” an individual in this artifice. I defy that. Although I must obey the rules, I have no choice in this matter, I am slave to the artifice of the world; but I am no slave to myself and I am able to transcend this shallow plane by playing by the rules, but defying them through authenticity. The more I play this game, trapped in this artifice, the more my own authenticity becomes manifest. The more I concede the more my primal nature takes shape in this contradiction of acceptance of the artifice but establishing my own character, true to my authentic human being who sees and thinks in more than two dimentions, takes shape and my abstracted form, is able to breath and cultivate itself in this two dimensional space.
The age of the history painting is past and we subsist in a shallow existence- depth is an illusion and we cannot deny societal confines. Anyone who denies this is denying themselves. But I allow myself the freedom to express my multi-dimensionality in a way that Braque would, placing temperament against intellect, desire against fantasy till my character is so abstracted that it bears the sense of three dimensionality.