Christian Wouters

In this curiously intimate but enigmatic interior scene, French Graphic Artist Christian Wouters invites us to enter a furnished room, exposed to sea and sky, full of mystical mysteries. The pages of a book left open on an arm chair still flutter, as if the reader has just put it down in haste to step out of our line of vision. The light source coming from somewhere to the right is of such intensity it reflects off the varnished surface of the concealing door. The actors may be missing from the scene, but the props of the chair and book and the beam of light have been used so often down the centuries in sacred art, it is not hard to guess, even without benefit of the artist's title, the drama going on on just beyond what we are able to see must be the Annunciation, recorded in Luke 1:26-38, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary to tell her she had been chosen to be the mother of the Christ Child.  And the allusions to sacred story do not stop there in this picture puzzle print. What are we to make of the yellow fruit, the goblet, and the white cloth on the window sill? Might they be the forbidden fruit of Eden, the chalice of the Last Supper, and, perhaps, the burial shroud of Christ? Could the stairway leading up and out of the picture be Jacob's Ladder? Wouters has left us an array of objects with multiple sacred meanings to be teased out in this transcendent pictorial space half-way between heaven and earth. (John Kohan)