ExhiBit: The City of The Plucky Squire
Where Picasso, Van Gogh, Dalí, and a passion for delirium all live together
Welcome back to Artcade, the museum of video games with a column devoted to museums inside video games. Panta rhei, as Heraclitus once put it, with far more philosophy to his name than anyone needs to read these lines. Today we’re visiting an interesting place: a city where a handful of artists have taken refuge. Being the nosy people we are, we’ll take the opportunity to look them in the face and celebrate some of their masterpieces. Enjoy the read.
The Plucky Squire is a game set inside a book, and that alone makes it perfect Artcade material. But Jot, the protagonist, isn’t content to stay there neatly between one page and the next: every now and then he jumps out of the volume and runs off the pages as if he were the digital opposite of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York.
In the middle of this adventure appears Artia, the creative capital of the land of Mojo, a peaceful retreat for many artists of centuries past and the worst nightmare of every surveyor alive. One look at almost any house is enough to figure out that the people living there must be impossible. But that’s exactly its charm. Today we’ll meet some of its most famous residents.
The first painter we’re stopping to chat with is one of the most beloved in the world, and maybe it’s no accident that his biography also resembles a tragic legend. Vincent van Gogh is the patron saint of tormented talent, proof that humanity can’t really love an artist without adding at least a splash of suffering.
And yet, when you look at his sunflowers, the torment gives way to a kind of restless energy, as if they were about to catch fire or start talking.
Vincent van Gogh (1888) Three Sunflowers in a Vase [Drei Sonnenblumen in einer Vase] [Painting] [Oil on canvas] [73 cm x 58 cm] Private collection, USA
You probably recognized him from the house alone, even without the mustache. There’s something unique about certain clocks that melt like cheese left out in the sun, the creation of one of the great saboteurs of the twentieth century.
