Earlier this year when so many millions of us were confined to our homes, newspapers and TVs and phones filled with images of the abandoned world beyond our walls, a world built by us for us without us.

It was odd, eerie.

The kind of imagery you only ever see in post apocalyptic movies.

City centers normally crowded with bodies empty except for some hungry and probably deeply confused pigeons.

It reminded me of the paintings of Giorgio de chirico, an italian artist who was a founder of the metaphysical art movement in 1909, de chirico was sitting on a bench in the piazza santa croce in Florence, recovering from an intestinal illness.

When all of a sudden he had a profound experience.

The whole world down to the marble of the buildings and fountains seemed to me to be convalescent.

The Kiriko glimpsed a reality behind appearances in which everything was healing like he was.

From that experience came this painting, the Enigma of an autumn afternoon which reproduces the piazza santa croce.

But with a few changes, most notably, the basilica facade is stripped of all its detail and its shape is altered.

It appears also to be only the facade.

You can see through the tops of the doors to the blue sky beyond the structure behind it has disappeared in the actual piazza, a statue of Dante stands in front of the basilica.

In this version, the statue's head has disappeared too and its position has been moved beside it too.

Small lonely figures stand together casting long shadows in the unusually empty square.

The Enigma here is in the relationship between de criticos impression that day in the piazza and the painting it ultimately produced this and all the plazas in his metaphysical town square series are simplified, empty cut with dramatic shadows.

They feature recurring motifs like those heavy shadows or roman arcades or statues in the foreground, tall cylindrical buildings in the background and trains in the distance.

These are spaces we know, but they're rendered dreamlike by the criticos compositions.

The revelation, he feels can't be communicated by a realistic depiction of the world or, for that matter, a realistic depiction of vision.

He admired the impressionists and the pointillist for their experimentation, but believe they didn't go far enough to see reality without the mediating filter of our ideas about it.

The world must be made new for the viewer and to make the world knew it must be made strange.

The artist must live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious multicolored toys which can change their appearance.

It was the strangeness of Dickie rico's paintings, their mystery and hallucinatory quality that made him such an influence on the surrealists.

They too wanted to capture a world of dream logic in which something profound could arise from irrational juxtapositions and spontaneous creation In 1920, for the year Britain published the Surrealist Manifesto, Takehiko traveled to Paris and was accepted into the group, but by then he had moved on from his metaphysical phase and returned to older forms of painting.

The surrealists trashed his new work.

And Dick Kiriko cut ties with them in an acrimonious split.

He kept working through the rest of his life all 90 years of it.

But as is often the case, never enjoyed the same success he did during his early period.

But it is those early works, those bizarre, melancholy town squares that came to my mind when the coronavirus tore through the world and cleared our public spaces of people.

For a little while, cities and towns became immense museums of strangeness.

And it was possible to see what we built through alien eyes.

What kind of species would make such monuments?

What drove them to design their world like this?

What forces and desires gathered them into communities of such extreme density.

And are they satisfied with what they've made for themselves In a year of such pain and suffering.

These images offered a small but unique gift of reflection, the kind of reflection that de chirico sought to spark with his work though the pandemic isn't over.

Our spaces are already filling back up.

Soon enough will pick up the routines we dropped in March and the built world will fade again into the background of our lives.

I'm ready for that as I'm sure you are too.

But every once in a while, these images like those paintings will resurface and will remember that time when our world became profoundly strange.

Hey everybody thank you so much for watching and congratulations on getting through this year.

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