Sky Division – “Madonna Smiling, Basquiat Crying“, 2026
Madonna smiling, Basquiat crying – pretends to be more emotionally loaded than it first appears. Love becomes fame, fame becomes art, art becomes destruction. They dated briefly in 1982-83, while both were becoming famous. According to Madonna’s later account, after the breakup Basquiat asked her to return the paintings he had made for her and then painted over them in black. He simply reclaimed paintings he had given her and covered them over. Thus the original paintings were deliberately obliterated by Basquiat, even if the canvas itself still physically existed.
Here, in my experiment Basquiat’s crying face isn’t merely sad because Madonna left – it suggests that the paintings associated with her, and perhaps the feelings behind them were “erased” too after the relationship ended. His tears and his sad face could be seen as a compact story about affection, fame, artistic ownership, and deliberate destruction. So Madonna smiling beside a crying Basquiat aims to capture a real and rather painful story – fame, intimacy, artistic possession, and destruction all in one scene. I was thinking “Madonna smiling, Basquiat crying” should create a tension between public image (of famous celebrities) and private emotion, between glamour and vulnerability, between performance and pain. Or at least, that contrast aims to give the composition something to organize itself around, rather than just introducing some random scribbles : )
(s. guraziu, sky division, 2026)
below my scribble gallery – me making a “scribble-essay about Basquiat” : )
