Eris at Play is a large mythological canvas: divided between the dark architectural mass of a vertical structure on the right and a glowing white void to its left. At the center, a thin red line descends diagonally, holding a golden apple by a thread. Below, two figures lean toward one another in the earthy impasto of the lower register, their exchange intimate and slightly conspiratorial. The apple hangs between them, undelivered, its consequence still suspended.
Eris at Play is a large mythological canvas: divided between the dark architectural mass of a vertical structure on the right and a glowing white void to its left. At the center, a thin red line descends diagonally, holding a golden apple by a thread. Below, two figures lean toward one another in the earthy impasto of the lower register, their exchange intimate and slightly conspiratorial. The apple hangs between them, undelivered, its consequence still suspended.
The golden apple belongs to Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, who introduced it to the banquet of the gods inscribed “for the fairest,” setting in motion the chain of rivalries that would end in Troy. Kitterle deploys the myth at its most charged moment: not the war, not the judgment, but the instant before the apple lands, when the potential for catastrophe is still perfectly suspended. The red line that holds it is not a rope but a line of tension in every sense: compositional, narrative, temporal.
The combination of oil and plaster on this large canvas produces a surface that is simultaneously theatrical and archaeological. Max Ernst staged mythological and oneiric dramas with comparable suspended precision: objects and figures held at the moment before narrative resolution, the drama legible but the outcome withheld. Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical interiors follow the same temporal logic: the abandoned plaza, the clock stopped, the drama implied but never discharged. Kitterle situates this within a fresco tradition he encountered directly: Luca Signorelli’s Orvieto cycle, where he exhibited in 1996, presents figures caught in eschatological events whose consequences have not yet arrived. Eris at Play holds the same position: suspended between potential and catastrophe.
