Those who are not familiar with the courtesan Violetta from La traviata on the opera stage may have already seen her in cinema—for instance, in Pretty Woman or Woody Allen's Match Point. She has also established a role for herself in literature, such as in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece, which celebrated its world premiere in Venice in 1853, has long since entered not only the opera world but also general cultural history, constantly retold, reinterpreted, and reimagined. Within each of us, the image of this female character lives on. But how can we visually convey the inner conflict of this tragic heroine, Violetta, today? How can we depict her virtuosic, ecstatic arias on a poster or in a playbill?

And how does one encapsulate the universe of the curious Mr. Brouček—the petty bourgeois dreamer from Leoš Janáček's satirical opera, who unwittingly travels to the moon and immediately after stumbles into the 15th century, never breaking free from his narrow mindedness? While Brouček is less popular than Violetta, this opera from the 1920s—with its simultaneous timelines and "Back to the Future" switch—reflects our present day in a way few other works do.

Even the multifaceted program of the orchestra concerts, which initially resists any straightforward narrative, calls for a visual language. Visual arts, music, and opera have always shared their themes and motifs, even if they continue to circulate in different circles of society today.

Marcel Proust wrote: "Music is perhaps the perfect example of an art form that has the power to touch us on the deepest level, by painting new worlds—worlds whose existence we might never have imagined without it." In music, we see how strongly images can arise within us, and how these visual worlds can also carry sound within them, a motif that finds a visual counterpart in Nicolas Party’s work.

The artist, who lives in New York and Brussels, often thinks of his paintings as stage spaces. "I am deeply drawn to the performing arts," he confesses, "and I view the canvas as a stage set, where perspectives flatten, yet light and shapes appear dramatic." Just as operas frequently fill the air in his studio, his paintings also breathe with that theatrical tension between masking and revealing. In his works, Party creates a language in which colors seem to sing and at the same time carry stories and emotions—enigmatic, yet both restrained and expressive. His portraits and landscapes resemble masks, settings, or figures waiting for their cue, while simultaneously moving within a timeless, foreign world. This tension between surface and inner life, mask and truth, life and death, lies at the very heart of his work.

Portrait with Lotus Flowers (2024/Image on the right) transports viewers to an ethereal, symbolic world. The central figure does not appear as an individual face but as a mask-like archetype. The pink flowers encircle her sharp gaze and symbolize transience and the fragility of her love. An image as an icon, offering a new interpretation of Violetta’s tragedy.

Face to Face (2018/Image on page 16), in turn, seems to have directly emerged from Janáček's opera. Two heads, mirrored, glowing, reduced are reminiscent of the surrealist works of René Magritte with their flat, artistic approach. They serve as a kind of painterly comment on Brouček’s adventures: An image of doubling and self-deception that silently and visually echoes the irony and grotesqueness of the opera.

In relation to a concert program, one might understand Trees (2019/Image on page 28) as a visual counterpart to music: Isolated trees in the image, detached from time and place, like abstract figures on a stage. Just as a concert consists of individual movements, themes, or tone colors, each tree motif unfolds its own mood: cheerful, mysterious, melancholic, or celebratory. The reduction and elevation in Party's painting style recalls the compositional condensation in music, where individual motifs give rise to great dramatic arcs.

Nicolas Party's artworks open spaces in which opera, concert, and visual art seamlessly intertwine. They condense atmospheres, weave stories, and transform reality into an aesthetic experience and a timeless symbol.