Arearea

Arearea (Joyousness, 1892) at the Musée d'Orsay belongs to the most lyrical category of Gauguin's first Tahitian production — canvases in which the figures and landscape are bathed in a warm, uncomplicated light that embodies the Polynesian paradise he was constructing. Two women sit in the foreground of a landscape in which a third, barely visible, plays a flute, and a red dog lies at rest nearby. The red dog — completely non-naturalistic, another Synthetist liberation of color from description — became one of his most famous formal inventions, its vivid presence enlivening the composition without any attempt at animal naturalism. The work belongs to the specific moment of 1892 when his first Tahitian vision was at its most complete and confident, before the physical and psychological difficulties of his second stay complicated the luminous certainty of his first-period paintings. The Orsay's Arearea alongside the La belle Angèle and Tahitian Women on the Beach provides Paris with a comprehensive survey of his transition from Breton Synthetism to Tahitian mastery.

Arearea is remarkable for its deliberately unrealistic colours — the grass is vivid orange-red rather than green, a choice Gauguin justified as expressive necessity. Non-naturalistic colour is used throughout to convey spiritual conditions.