Dream imagery and sublimate landscapes as Hollywood scenery
A horse, with pointed ears and bulging eyes, its head showing through a red velvet curtain, an element of classical theatre. This is the main theme of the painting Der Nachtmahr by Johann Heinrich Füssli. The animal – which symbolises natural instincts – and the dress of the sleeping woman – which reveals her sensual shape – combine fear and sexual desire in a sensational and eccentric blend. While Füssli brings nightmares and death together, Hansruedi Giger takes the beautiful woman into the kingdom of death, in his painting Der Tod. In the form of a hermaphrodite creature, half human, half animal, the monster attacks the naked woman. The tail symbolises an almost volcanic impulsiveness, while the skull warns of the imminent death. This avid monster’s position and its threatening expression are superbly horrifying. While Füssli exhibits his sleeping woman as an erotic feminine body, Giger goes beyond this theme, with exaggerated sexual urges, concupiscence and dark powers.
With his famous picture Die Toteninsel (1880), Arnold Böcklin created a mystical landscape which defined nature and history as the great themes of his time. By combining several mythological aspects and genres, Böcklin raised architecture, landscapes and characters to the same level. While the paintings of his contemporaries showed people out walking along the boulevards on Sundays, Böcklin filled out his surrealist and fanciful visions with elements from ancient mythology. He surprises us with strange graphic ideas and symbolic effects of colour. This process inspired Giger to his adaptation, Hommage à Böcklin (1977), which shows without a doubt his fascination for this 17th century Swiss painter. The designer highlights the mysterious effect sought by Böcklin, by clearly exaggerating the morbid expressions that we often find in his work.
The illustrator John Howe, currently living in Switzerland, took part in the design concept for the film The Lord of the Rings. In his numerous pieces on the work of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Howe incorporates fantastic scenes in realistic mountain settings which he combines with castles and portrayals which are metaphoric in nature. For Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Howe created a romantic coast at sunset to represent Cape Forostar. The gushing water and the cliffs that rise up abruptly, contrast with the velvet structure to produce a sublime effect. In the same way, in the painting High alps, glacier and snowy peaks by Felix Vallotton, the water catches the eye. The snow on the mountain – which forms diagonal lines across the picture – does not look cold, but soft and moist like whipped cream. A fascination with natural elements such as stone or water persists in pictures and film. With Howe, we find stone with pointed surfaces, shelves, steep rocks or hollows in singular shapes. He emphasises the vivacity of the different forms which this inert substance can take, as well as his great potential for illustration.
Deak Ferrand transforms landscapes into their opposites, with the help of a computer. Summer becomes winter, intact worlds are transformed into ruins. However, computer graphics artists still use traditional techniques to create the aesthetic base for certain scenes. In films such as What Dreams may come or Hellboy, rocky mountain ranges are everpresent in forming the immense background of a gloomy underworld. For these films, but also for others, Deak Ferrand developed not only monumental panoramas, but also blue and brown vaults. In the same way, Caspar Wolf with his representations of caves transfers a certain sentiment of the romantic period. His work communicates the search for the mysterious and creative origins of nature, or the return to the origins of the world. His painting Blick aus dem Inneren der Beatushöhle (1977) shows us, by using an impressive perspective, the symbolic natural power which comes from the inside of a rocky mountain. Beginning with the shadowy light of the cave, Wolf shows us a landscape filled with light, framed by an opening in the mountain range. In a similar way, Ferrand fills the inside of the mountain with rocks, so the cave is lit with an intense blue light, a colour which artists from the romantic period were passionate about, and which implied among other things something spiritual.
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