You Stay Here for Good: The Terrifying Limbo of Edward Hopper
The American realist left me with no impression of a reality I was looking at. At first glance, his paintings are all about what is happening right now. But let your eyes linger a little, and it feels like limbo. I wondered why.
Hopper’s works capture moments from everyday life — the routine we, our friends, or our relatives experience daily. It seems like life itself. But who ever called it “Life”? As a rule, we picture “Life” as something Hollywood-esque: impressive, dynamic, chasing a goal minute by minute without a pit stop. The art of Edward Hopper is what we do instead. In our bright fantasies, we call this “anti-life”: the routine, the boredom, the meaningless jobs, etcetera (yes, in complete form, because we have plenty of time here).
A girl is sewing. A man is reading a newspaper. A Yellow Hat is drinking coffee. A woman is sitting in her bed, looking out the window. It may seem like a talk about loneliness, as in Nighthawks. But I doubt this is the most interesting thing to see there. Many of Hopper’s canvases do not envelop you in loneliness, but in a lulling coziness. The light is often midday, and soft everywhere, even at night. It is so casual and habitual that you cannot leave. Not because you don’t want to… You are a character from Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — that kind of “can’t.”
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A man is working at a gas station. No cars around, yet the guy keeps doing something. And you feel immediately: “He does it ALL THE TIME.” The girl just left her country house. Warm, sunny. An understandable desire to feel the sunshine, to meet a new day. But it is noon already, and, for God’s sake, where are you even going from here? There is only emptiness outside.
Hopper’s cityscape pastorals are like Terrence Malick movies: you are walking through a field with no final destination. Because these quasi-cozy actions we do every day are the horrifying limbo we are stuck in.
Finally, I force myself to stop looking, clear my mind, and do something else, launching an everlasting dream about the “real life” which will begin eventually.
