LA CIVETTA - April 2021 | Page 22

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De Chirico and isolation- beautiful solitude or a dystopian nightmare ?

Back in March 2020 , as the rest of Europe looked on apprehensively , Italy entered its first lockdown . To most of us , the thought of being cooped up indoors for the foreseeable future seemed unimaginable , apocalyptic , even . Yet , after an initial period of acclimatisation to this newfound solitude , some small blessings began to emerge from the woodwork . Photos circulated depicting sparkling clean streets , unpolluted Venetian canals and people exchanging smiles from balcony to balcony . Finding the good in these unprecedented times became a global movement .
Source : mutualart . com .
A year later , the conversation has changed to one of speculation . How much longer might this go on for ? Is this the new normal ? And , perhaps most devastatingly , could we have seen this coming ? Some comment cynically about how ‘ they predicted this on the Simpsons ’, or about ‘ how Orwellian our lives have become ’. We may laugh about this dismissively , but there is one man in the Western cultural canon whose work displays some uncanny similarities with our current reality …