The religious paintings of Eugene de Leastar.

'Will religious art revive or ever return? The making of art does not necessarily follow a linear momentum; Apelles hardly said to himself ‘now that I am born in the classical period I will paint thus.’

Religious art dies as Christian faith dies across Europe. Why did the people stop believing in the Greek gods? Paganism died because the gods lost their power. They became simply empty statutes and declined into the aesthetic world. Christ is losing his power in the west as his icon is fading. His image is moving into the museum rooms adjacent to those with Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and Dionysius.

When George Pell asked if we had been a prisoner of the Greeks, he was referring to Joseph Ratzinger’s contention that Christianity at the beginning chose the ‘God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions.’

Every age has its own madness, its own iconoclasm, ours is that science has the answer to questions it cannot even ask. It is the folly that isolated reason could ever be a paradigm of meaning.' 

Quotation from de Leastar's essay 'A Painter's Observations on the Image of Christ'.

An allegory concerning the perverted muse of postmodernism by Eugene de Leastar (oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2014)

The character entitled 'Saatchi' in this painting obviously bears no relation to Mr Charles Saatchi, the contemporary art purveyor, except in appearance.

'Clearly the manifestos (the aesthetics) produced over the last century by artists, are not really part of any philosophical debate. These manifestos, and indeed the inscrutable hysteria of shallowness that is 'performance' and 'installation' art, prove that contemporary artists have an overriding and legitimate excuse that absolves them from intellectual inquiry, namely stupidity (Eccomi qui condemnatto).'

Quotation from de Leastar's essay 'Art against Philosophy'

A literal key for the above painting, an abandoned allegory of philosophy by Eugene de Leastar (oil on canvas, 53 X 52 inches, 2010)

'In Europe, over the last century, this hot housing of thought has produced a bedlam of ideas. Looking at it now. is like visiting those poor wretches incarcerated in 18th century madhouses where for a small fee one could spend an hour of morbid entertainment.

First there is the din of overcrowded intellectuals jostling for attention; the mad eyes the demented have that appear to see right into your soul; the preening of logical positivists; the chauvinism of existentialists; Marxists and dialectical materialists leering with social rage and genocidal menace; disturbed Freudians exposing themselves; logicians twisting on tautologies; the clamor of half-rationalists howling half-truths.

Attempted breakouts are merely herded into adjoining cells. Observe the crazed structuralists pointing at everything as though it had some mysterious portent. And who could not be moved, to pity the wretched deconstructionists, masticating loudly thinking they are talking'.

Quotation from de Leastar's essay 'Art against Philosophy'

Allegories on the denigration of Art and the corruption of Painting. All paintings are oil on canvas by Eugene de Leastar.

The self portraits at the end were executed in the traditional manner without the use of photography.