Repulsion and appeal: emotional tension in Chaïm Soutine’s Still Life with Rayfish

The viewing of a Chaïm Soutine painting is a multifaceted, complex and enduring sensory experience. Soutine’s artworks elicit a kaleidoscopic emotional response. Focusing on Still Life with Rayfish, this essay will explore how the artist provokes emotions that are in tension with one another, specifically the push and pull between delight and abjection. Depicting a rayfish hung up over a table of objects and food, Soutine’s oil on canvas was painted after Chardin’s The Ray. In this essay, I will explore how Soutine creates these emotional responses through subject matter, context, composition, brushwork, colour and light. I will ask which of these areas is key to the success of his creation of emotional tension.