Rubens: The Power of Transformation, by Vlad Joldis

               It's amazing how big of a difference it makes seeing a painting in real life compared to seeing it on your desktop, even if it's on a very high resolution.

The stiffness of our desktop steals from the magic of art and it serves as an appetizer  at best, preparing us for the "face to face" confrontation with a given artist or image.

That's the conclusion that I came to when I visited the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main earlier this year, and that's how I related to the title of the exhibition, "The Power of Transformation":

 The sheer force of a painting when seeing it in a controlled environment;  the way it can transform your perception of it and  tattoo a mark of genius on your retina.

               The Städel Museum in Frankfurt hosted an exhibition showcasing the work of Peter PaulRubens, arguably the most influential painter of the Flemish Baroque era. The exhibition started on 8 February 2018 and ended in 21 May 2018, and I was lucky enough to be in the city during this interval and visit it.

The air was getting thicker as I was getting closer to the location, and I felt so small in front of the Museum, an imposing building that breathes the history of beauty  through its every pore.

The Städel was honoured as “Museum of the Year 2012” by the German art critics association AICA in 2012. In the same year the museum recorded the highest attendance figures in its history, of 447,395 visitors.

Entering the building I was impressed by the tidiness of it and the modern atmosphere it created. It might not seem like that big of a deal but it was my first visit to an international museum, that looked the way a 21st century museum should look like.

I visited the permanent collection which is a chronological order through art history hosting huge names and works across centuries . This first encounter which, mind you, lasted for more than six hours got my eye more than calibrated for the cherry on top, the aforementioned Rubens exhibition.

The entirety of the museum was bright and well lit, creating a sort of neutral atmosphere in which every work of art could express itself in its own space, but when i entered the Rubens exhibition the light became dim and intimate.

The space was a bit constricted, with small rooms, allowing the huge paintings to tower over the man and swallow your whole being into them.

The light bonded with the paintings' palette making them seem like an organic whole, and making the oil on them literally glow. This picture was completed by the blue  and dark green walls that contrasted with Rubens' warm colors.

That space at that time felt like a limbo, like a self-governed heaven where the paintings tell you all you need to know and give you all that you need, as long as you don't break eye contact.

The exhibition consisted of roughly 100 items, 31 paintings and 23 drawings by the master. Those were completed by contemporaries and precursors such as Titian, Tintoretto or Rembrandt  to complete Rubens' dialogue with his era in his 50 years of production.

 Among paintings and drawings, there were sculptures and prints. Some of the paintings exhibited here were: Prometheus, a collaboration with Frans Snyders, 1612-1618; The Entombment, c. 1612; The Head of Medusa, 1617/18; Crown of Thorns (Ecce homo), c. 1612; Death of Hippolytus, 1611-1613 and Self-Portrait, 1638.  The works I mentioned are based on my personal taste, and not named in a specific order.

I must have completed anywhere from three to five laps around the exhibition trying to grasp my mind on every detail, and not necessarily because I felt an aesthetic need to do so, but because I felt the presence of Rubens' genius, and when you get to encounter it, it forms a black hole in which you let yourself desintegrated with a smile on your face.