Quan la pintura es pot sentir | Carla Claros | TEDxIgualada

Quick Overview

The speaker argues that art should be experienced multisensorially, moving beyond mere visual perception to engage touch, smell, and hearing, demonstrating this concept by translating iconic artworks and fashion designs into tactile or olfactory experiences.

Key Points: The speaker challenges the traditional visual focus of art appreciation, advocating for engagement through all senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing). The speaker asks the audience to imagine tracing Joan Miró's painting 'Solitaire' using their sense of touch, suggesting a deeper, non-visual connection to the art. The presentation contrasts the visual art of Ivan Aivazovsky's painting of Ivan the Terrible with a modern fashion design interpretation featuring sharp, angular shapes. The speaker demonstrates the multisensory translation by having a model wear a golden drape inspired by a painting ('The Tempest' by John William Waterhouse, 1888) to evoke fluidity and movement. The speaker notes that the tactile experience of the golden dress (fluidity, asymmetry) connects to the visual chaos and emotion of the painting, suggesting art can be felt as well as seen. The speaker concludes that art's impact, whether visual or sensory, transforms the viewer, making the experience profoundly significant.

Context: This TEDxIgualada talk, titled 'Quan la pintura es pot sentir' (When painting can be felt), features a young speaker, Carla Claros, exploring the limitations of purely visual art appreciation. She uses examples from painting (Miró, Aivazovsky) and fashion design to argue for the importance of engaging other senses—such as touch, smell, and sound—to achieve a deeper, more meaningful connection with creative works.

Detailed Analysis

The speaker begins by asking the audience to imagine tracing a painting by Joan Miró, perhaps one from the Fundació Joan Miró, using only their sense of touch, suggesting that art engagement should not be limited to sight. She poses rhetorical questions about why we restrict ourselves to visual perception when we could also feel, smell, or hear art, emphasizing that sensory engagement leads to a deeper, more vivid experience. She illustrates this with two contrasting examples: Ivan Aivazovsky's painting of Ivan the Terrible striking his son, which evokes feelings of pain and sorrow, and a sharp, black-and-pink fashion sketch inspired by it, which symbolizes the violence through its form. Conversely, she presents John William Waterhouse's painting, 'The Tempest' (1888), which she describes as conveying movement and lightness, and shows two fashion sketches inspired by it—one gold, one white/sheer—that capture the fluidity and drape of the artwork. She then brings a model on stage wearing the golden interpretation, which she describes as embodying the painting's movement and texture, despite the original painting depicting a chaotic scene. The speaker emphasizes that the sensory experience (like the feeling of the fabric) can be profoundly moving, even if the subject matter (like Ivan the Terrible's grief) is distressing, arguing that art's true power lies in its ability to affect us across all senses.