In Imagine Picasso, the mash-up of styles results in incoherence. (Photo by me)
The short review is that it doesn’t work. But at least it doesn’t work for interesting reasons.
Encore Productions, the same folks who brought us Imagine Van Gogh, which has now closed in Vancouver, are offering Imagine Picasso. Like Imagine Van Gogh, Imagine Picasso is an immersive event: in Vancouver, you enter a huge room in the Convention Centre and are instantly surrounded by wall-sized projections of images created by the great Spanish artist. Music plays as these paintings and fragments of paintings appear, disappear, and slide down in great sheets towards the floor, which is also covered in projections.
The Van Gogh version of this approach succeeds because Van Gogh’s paintings are unabashedly sensual, decorative, and stylistically consistent. These qualities are less present in Picasso’s oeuvre. [Read more…]
