This is the film we’ve been waiting for: Joker: Folie à deux just released. Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix embody with wonder and zaniness the couple of Harley Quinn and the Joker and it made us think of three artists who share a bit of the same love and creative madness.
Obviously, we needed a somewhat chaotic painter. His dripping technique is proof of his creative madness. If there was a painting to depict the mind of the Joker, it would undoubtedly be a work by Jackson Pollock, like Convergence. Ultimately, the two share the same mental colors. If you want to admire paintings by the American expressionist, go to the Parisian Picasso museum which exhibits his first paintings.
Yayoi Kusama loves colorful wigs, big patterns, bold colors and monumental displays, a bit like our beloved Harley Quinn. The two have a very marked and monomaniacal universe: when Harley Quinn has an obsession, she keeps it, and that’s more or less what Yayoi Kusama has done all her life, by drawing the same polka dots repeatedly and reproducing the same pumpkins over and over again.
Since 1977, the artist has lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she has her own artist’s studio, on the same street, a few blocks down. If the Joker and Harley Quinn had found a passion for art during their internment, there is no doubt that they too would have asked to have their own studio in their hospital room.
He is the love painter par excellence and let’s not forget that between the Joker and Harley Quinn, there is love, more than madness. In Marc Chagall, love is elevated to the spiritual, the religious. “In life, as on the artist’s palette, there is only one color that gives meaning: it is the color of love”, said the painter, whose titles of works range from Poppy lovers has My Bride with Black Gloves. Love, we told you.
