The not innocent meaning of the works of art in Pedro Almodóvar's 'The human voice'

For Almodóvar,

like everything else, is never a simple matter of decoration.

We must pay attention to the paintings and sculptures that appear in his films, because they function as

that tell us about the characters and their conflicts as much or more than the script lines.

In the short

, for example, the still lifes of the Madrid-born realist painter Isabel Quintanilla (1938-2017) and the photos of

reinforce the idea of ​​the domestic interior.

Although we know –because that is how we are shown without hiding the stage line– that we are in a set mounted inside an industrial warehouse, and that the action we are contemplating could be a representation of the representation.

Or maybe not.

In the movie, Tilda Swinton is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

And we attend as spectators the hardest moments of any love relationship, which are those of the breakup.

Yours.

On her conjugal bed hangs a reproduction of

, the original of which was painted around 1625 by the baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and which is currently in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (United States).

The canvas represents the goddess of love naked, asleep and illuminated by the light of the moon, while her son - who is also from Mars, god of war - fans her with some peacock feathers.

All this iconography is chosen with great care by Almodóvar.

In his career, the motif of the reclining Venus appears on numerous occasions, often as an allusion to desire and love, but also to the woman's body at once eroticized and impregnable: this idea was part of the plot of films such as

,

or

.

Some plans of Elena Anaya in the latter already recreated classical representations such as

Velázquez's

, while

Tiziano's

hung on the walls of the house of the leading surgeon

, and in his office you could glimpse the painting of the contemporary artist Guillermo Pérez Villalta

, with a very similar composition.

Only in this case there are some details that add layers to the narrative.

Gentileschi painted the picture more than a decade after being raped by the also painter Agostino Tassi, an attack for which the figure of the painter is often remembered, above the enormous quality of her artistic work.

In this way, Almodóvar introduces in his short an element present in many of his previous films, such as the ones we mentioned before: that of the coveted woman sexually assaulted by a man.

And the hedonistic invitation to love that the painting apparently makes takes on darker, almost threatening overtones that hover over the entire story.

References to Greco-Roman mythology reappear in another work of art, only this time it is a twentieth-century avant-garde painting.

The Italian metaphysician Giorgio de Chirico signed his

in 1917

, where two mannequins with very human body language put their anatomies together in what could be interpreted as a love affair.

However, in fact it is a farewell, since it is recorded the moment when Andrómaca is about to lose her husband Hector, prince of Troy, who goes to war.

As veteran readers of Homer we know that Hector will die pierced by the spear of Achilles during the defense of his city.

That is why, for the Greeks, Andromache symbolized the noble suffering of the women of Troy, and by extension of all warlike conflicts.

But, as we all know, the conflict that interests Almodóvar the most is love.

As Imanol Arias affirms in

, “there is no war comparable to you”.

Here Tilda Swinton is transformed into a modern Andromache, in the process of losing the man she still loves.

Only she will not react with the same resignation of the literary character, and if Troy must burn it will be by his hand.

At another time, and in a more discreet way,

, by the surrealist Dada artist Man Ray

, bursts onto the scene

.

It is a photo from 1929 of which the Reina Sofía Museum has a posthumous copy from 1982. In it, a naked woman appears again, reclining under dreamlike lighting.

That this time comes from the solarization technique applied by the photographer, consisting of exposing the negative to sunlight.

As a curiosity, the model was also the artist Meret Oppenheim, author of the sculpture

, consisting of a cup, a saucer and a teaspoon lined with animal skin.

In this famous surrealist object, the domestic and the wild, the everyday and the erotic met, in an approach as original as it was revolutionary to the idea of ​​femininity.

There is something of that piece alluded to but not shown in all of Almodóvar's filmography, as there is in

, whose end - which we will not reveal - incorporates the germ of all revolutions, which consists of destroying the old so that, on its ashes, the new can break through and flourish.

Finally, few will miss a drawing that decorates the living room of Tilda Swinton's apartment where, as in the photo of Man Ray, a naked woman grabs one of her breasts while tilting her head back.

Only here she is not lying down but standing up, and although she does not seem asleep she closes her eyes to get intoxicated with the smell of a flower of a sparkling red.

It is

, made in 1920 by the Peruvian-born painter and illustrator Alberto Vargas, who achieved great renown in the United States thanks to his

extraordinarily detailed and sensual

portraits

.

And again we face a hidden danger under the guise of desire: Olive Thomas, the actress who served as a model for this play, died that same year after drinking a whole bottle of the syphilis medication that had been prescribed for her husband , with whom he had a tumultuous relationship.

Many interpreted then that the ingestion was not accidental, and that Thomas had committed suicide.

All this was already in the theatrical work of Jean Cocteau of which Almodóvar appropriates it by taking it to his land.

To encapsulate it in half an hour of narration, and also add endless references that condense all of the director's previous filmography, a lot of art is needed.

And some pictures too.

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