McALLEN — Walking through the exhibition room here at the McAllen Convention Center one is immediately in awe of the bright yet cool colors and history displayed, which seemed to shimmer fluidly from work to work, evoking a surreal atmosphere where the boundaries of a three-dimensional room and art meet.
It’s a transcendent experience at the “Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” exhibit at the convention center in McAllen, which opened to the public Friday and will run through Jan. 12. The exhibit is inspired by Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh’s life and works of art.
Following the path created by floating frames and illuminated signs, which describe Van Gogh’s works that reflect each of his emotions, a waterfall room creates a feeling of calm fluidity as though being transported into another realm.
And transported you are.
Then there’s the main attraction, the immersive experience room, where one can see each stroke of Van Gogh’s paintbrush. The surreal movement of each image creates a sense of stepping into a painting.
It breathed life into the vibrant and swirled sky of “The Starry Night.”
“Motion design here helps you understand his journey and how he developed his style, how he really came to own this intensity,” said Fanny Curtat, art historian for Beyond Van Gogh.
Curtat, whose role in the project was to provide background information about Van Gogh’s life, also assisted in the selection of art presented in the exhibit.
She explained that each piece selected was placed in a specific order that told a chronological story of how Van Gogh’s work changed throughout his career.
The immersive experience includes 300 paintings that are combined with quotes from Van Gogh’s journal.
“He is such an easy fit for an experience like this because he is not only very relevant and still very inspiring for a lot of generations but he’s also based his art in movement and color … so you don’t have to do too much to actually breathe life into it because it’s already so dynamic,” Curtat said.
The idea for an immersive experience exhibit became a prominent form of displaying art during the pandemic due to its easy mobility.
This particular exhibit was created in October 2020 and began to tour in summer 2021.
According to Curtat, the 30,000-square-feet exhibit includes various technical aspects that emphasize the emotions conveyed in each painting.
“When you look at his work you see brightness, color, movement, intensity, joy, healing nature, all of these things that he wanted to communicate and you don’t need any art degree to appreciate that,” Curtat said.
She added that the exhibit is often featured in seven or eight cities at a time and has already passed through cities such Austin, Honolulu, Ottawa, Cordoba and other places.
The immersive room paintings tell a narrative depicting Van Gogh’s journey from the Netherlands to the south of France. The story is told by showing the changes in style and color going from darker tones to “the explosion of color.”
Curtat explained that the most difficult thing about the process was projecting these paintings without altering Van Gogh’s intentions.
“It’s about finding this middle ground of not transforming the essence of the paintings, we don’t want to take away from anything that his genius did,” Curtat said. “It’s about really having some animation that corresponds to the movement that he wanted to put in there. It’s about finding this balance.”
Although works such as “The Starry Night” and “Café Terrace at Night” are among the most popular Van Gogh works, for Curtat the painting she believes audiences should pay particular attention to is “Almond Blossoms.”
This holds significance because the work, which Van Gogh created after his nephew was born, emphasizes optimism, which Curtat felt was necessary to convey at a time when people have been starved for hope after the despair of the COVID-19 pandemic. Van Gogh, she said, was accustomed to struggle, and believes people can relate to his world perception via his art.
His work was the most obvious choice to highlight because although Van Gogh endured much, his optimistic view of the world as a place of beauty and color never changed, she added.
“It is the greatest example of the fact that his work is about joy and celebration of life,” Curtat said.
The convention center, located at 700 Convention Center Blvd. in McAllen, is hosting the exhibit from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday, and from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. It’s closed on Mondays.
Visit vangoghmcallen.com to purchase tickets.
To see more, view Monitor photojournalist Delcia Lopez’s full photo gallery here:
