Description

The Bosch’s work is considered one of the most hermetic works in the history of painting and at the same time the one that has aroused the greatest number of interpretations.

The motif of the three panels of the triptych and of the two faces of the cover, in black and white, is water. The first panel presents life in its fullness, while the premonition of death is illustrated by an icy lake on the third panel. The night of a cold winter, together with the flames of a distant fire. The two extremes that make life impossible.

Bosch combines the medieval way of depicting animals and objects at different scales ignoring the principles of proportion with a Renaissance structure that follows the rules of perspective. These alterations open the way to a dream world full of symbolism.

A giant head, with a body of a cracked egg, looks back before crossing to the other side. This is the only human reference that I decided to keep in my version due to its strong symbolic character.

On the water, constructions of an incomparable fantasy are erected that will later influence surrealism and figures such as Dalí or Walt Disney. Buildings constructed with shapes inspired by shells of the most diverse creatures. Among them there are chrysalis, butterfly cocoons, and ovoid shapes that announce the beginning of a new life. One of them occupies the center of the triptych.

Real and fantastic animals, science and religion, rites and processions, the earthly and the divine, vanish and acquire a greater relevance as the eternal and the fleeting, the beginning and the end, life and death.