Curtiz - Those Happy People I

“Those Happy People I” by Curtiz (Kris De Meester) is a 60 x 90 cm mixed media painting on aluminium that fuses acrylic, ecoline, and marker to create a visually arresting and emotionally ambivalent scene. Against a vast, textured blue sky, a series of identical girls in white dresses and striped socks appear frozen mid-fall—or perhaps mid-flight—around stark red urban buildings. The repetition of the figure suggests both motion and suspension, a looping moment between gravity and grace. The clean geometry of the architecture contrasts with the fluidity of the figures, amplifying a sense of tension between freedom and confinement, innocence and loss. The saturated colors and hard-edged perspective evoke a cinematic unreality—like a still from a lucid dream or a haunting déjà vu. With subtle irony, the title “Those Happy People I” underscores the dissonance between visual brightness and psychological unease, turning an image of play into a meditation on fragility, conformity, and the illusion of happiness within the modern urban landscape.