Arearea no varua ino

Arearea no varua ino (Amusement of the Evil Spirit, or Play of the Evil Spirits) was painted in 1894 in Paris, during Gauguin's interlude between his two Pacific sojourns. The title references Polynesian spirit belief, specifically the fearful ino spirits Gauguin associated with the nocturnal supernatural. Two women sit in a shadowed, ambiguous space accompanied by a crouching spectral figure; the darkness that pervades the canvas marks a tonal contrast with the sun-bleached works of the first Tahitian visit. The painting reflects Gauguin's increasingly sombre preoccupation with death and the spirit world during a period of mounting illness, debt, and artistic discouragement.

Gauguin works primarily in a restricted dark palette — deep indigo, ochre, and muted crimson — abandoning the bright tropical key of his earlier Tahitian canvases. The outlines are heavier and more emphatic than his earlier synthetist work, and the background dematerialises into near-abstraction.