26/29
D026: André Durand: Kronos, 2004, 127 x 127.

DURAND: KRONOS
Dr. Oonagh Lahr
London, September 2004

Most people today have more confidence in the brotherhood of man than in the fatherhood of god. To Goya Saturn was a father who digested his own children rather than let them grow up to get the better of him, so the artist shows us a cannibal god chewing bloodily on the figure of a naked woman.

In Durand's creation of the myth we see its true meaning; we see the devious-devising Titan who castrated his father in order to depose him standing with the ritual sickle of the castration under his foot and opening his mouth to swallow whole his own issue in order to avoid his own deposition. The infant, incidentally, is deprived of identity by being parceled up in swaddling clothes.

Kronos in Durand's painting is also Chronos, Time, which eats up its own progeny. The savagery of Kronos's intentions is to be seen in the wildly disordered hair, the pitilessness of his stare and the association with the death-knell complete with its support system of bell ringer invited by a ladder to toll out the destruction of life—all part of the paraphernalia of the church on which Kronos stands.

Partly because myths have been so systematically retold for children it is important when giving form to them neither to expurgate nor prettify them. Durand never does.

Peter Green's definition of myth is any central fact of human experience which is given dramatic, universal or personalized form by way of explanation or enlightenment. In this case what we see is an uncomfortable but all too familiar form of fatherhood which, as elsewhere in Greek myth, demonstrates the gap between the primitive and the civilized.

DURAND: KRONOS
Dr. Linnar Priimägi
Tallin, September 2004

There is grave content in this image, an extremely tragic vision, and a clear prophecy of the end of our planet.

I

Kronos genuflects on the roof of a church. He is about to swallow a large stone covered in swaddling cloth, instead of his last child, Zeus. Although according to the myth Kronos thinks he is swallowing Zeus, the artist knows that it is no more than stone—we all know. We know that the infant Zeus is secreted safely away. Durand has said, "Perhaps Kronos in my version of the myth thinks he is about to swallow the Bethlehem Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes like a Host-Corpus Christi". But this stone is a morsel of earth, a chunk of the body of Gaia, Mother Earth and mother of Kronos. Unwittingly the son gobbles a morsel his mother's body at a pagan communion, a histrionic Eucharist more elevated than any faith.

"Take and eat; this is my body" (Matthew 26:26)

To emphasize the sacrilegious, Durand has linked the ancient myth to the Greek orthodox churches essential to his composition and, by implication, the catastrophe of Santorini and the volcanic eruption circa 1400 B.C. — a spectacular annihilation of the earth by Time. All volcanoes are time bombs and the volcanic past and the lofty heights of these Churches overlooking the Caldera are fitting for Kronos. So, Durand's Kronos has a very dense semantic texture.

II

Concerning the age of Durand's Kronos, he seems to be a David Bowie—reluctant to accept the ageing process.

He wants to demonstrate that he is still young and strong and bloodthirsty. That he can fight and win. As the king Felipe II says in Friedrich Schiller's "Don Carlos" (V, 9):

Die Welt
Ist noch auf einen Abend mein.

And so he swallows his five of his children, to be exact, his potential, future-usurping rivals. This makes him desperate to distraction.

So, he has no age. He has denied age—as should somebody symbolizing time. Time must not age.

But Kronos, as we know, aged—aged at the same moment that he was cheated and a god of the next generation, Zeus, was spared and would live to overthrow him. By swallowing a stone, the body of his Mother Earth, Kronos inadvertently crosses the threshold of seniority.

Time devours Earth. Above this irredeemable act and the half globe of a cupola the symbol of Death is enthroned—a funeral bell, that casts its shadow before the feet of Time.

The secret union of Time and Death is also represented by the ladder that leads to another such bell, presenting its cord to the Last Ringer.

"Dann mag die Totenglocke schallen,

Dann bist du deines Dienstes frei,

Die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,

Es sei die Zeit für mich vorbei!"

 

"Tis I for whom the bell shall toll,

Then you are free, your service done.

For me the clock shall fail, to ruin run,

And timeless night descend upon my soul".

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I : Studierzimmer. WA I, 14, 82.)

More and more deeply Durand's Kronos reveals its meanings.

... The funeral bell, throwing its shadow between the knee and foot of Time connects the bell and the genitals—an old metaphor, which associates the decay of the world to sexuality.

Most exciting about this image is the pose of Kronos, a pose one has not encountered before must be Durand's original invention. This ponderous mannerist nude, rendered in an impalpable perspective, brings the upper part of its' body and head subtly closer to the viewer, intensifying the urgency of the message.

Addenda I

A sickle on the roof of a Greek church—this situation evokes the picture of Hagia Sophia. While inaugurating it in 537, emperor Justinian I overtly compared himself with king Solomon. This was a sign to the whole world—Constantinople is New Jerusalem and New Rome and this world's highest building is the true centre of the Christian faith. The dome of Hagia Sophia was a sign of Christianity until the conquest of Constantinople by Turks in 1453. Since that date, a sickle rises on the cupola. And Saint Peter in Rome was intended to become the High Temple of the Christian world. The actuality of the opposition of West and East, of Christianity and Islam adds to the Mr. Durand's painting more grave connotations. The Twin Towers of World Trade Centre were America's Saint Peter and Hagia Sophia. And as we can see, the sickle depicted by Mr. Durand is levitating.