BERNARD MUNTANER, France

The semi-circular brushstrokes with which van Gogh's paintings and drawings are composed have
always reminded me of cedillas, spinning and puffing round in pursuit, making the air vibrate.

Like the sickle in the corn, the paints prints a similar movement onto the field of his canvas.

"Noon : Rest from works" (1890), is to my knowledge, the only painting showing figures actually res-
ting, a situation which sharply contrasts "Crows in the Wheatfields" so full of dramatic perspective.
The duality : reason-passion and life-death determined these choices.

In superimposing these two paintings we may detect a similarity in composition, the black birds on the
left strangely fit into the outline of the woman's body.

On the ground, the bale of straw re-echoes, to the real, the rational yet the latter appears fixed and fro-
zen in rest, an eternal rest evoked by its shape. Here ironically, Nature appears less real than its representation in van Gogh's work.

Hanging above the canvas, the twin sickles, (another reality), re-echo those shown in the painting, yet
because of their shape, they also retain contain the macro-cedilla form of the brushstrokes, scaring
away the uncanny crows in a spiraling, spiritual ascension...

"I want to reach that high yellow note". Wasn't that van Gogh's way of expressing his desire to meet
true light ?

Bernard Muntaner, 1988.