by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Salomé, the Baptist, a predella study

0.0 x 0.0

Salomé, the Baptist, a predella study. Graphite. Oil red pastel. Pulp paper. 30x30cm Only the title can allow the viewer to guess the presence of the Baptist in this work where the kneeling figure of Salome, of great beauty, extends his left arm towards what seems to be a ghostly silhouette trying to merge with it. The young woman’s body is perfectly defined by the perfect lines of graphite and oil pastel that follow her forms. Only her head, as usual in the artist’s work, is invisible, at least the features of her face, lost in a mist of brown and deep red pigment that permeates the entire composition. The Baptist’s left arm and hand, ready to grasp his lover, and a part of his long body and hair can be guessed from him. The monochromy of rigour in the last works of the draughtsman gives way here to a two-tone work, of dust and mixed blood. The lines are of great variety, as is the artist’s new style, drawing like a veil, a fishnet, on Salome’s body, scratching the Baptist’s body with bloody scars. The two borders of the predella are made up of wooden pillars painted the same blood red, the weft of the support remaining in fragments perceptible. The fact that the artist tells us that this is a study for a predella is extremely important and interesting. In fact, he is referring to medieval art, an idea that is, however, undermined by the exquisite classicism of the figure of Salome, which takes us back to the nineteenth century and the works of Delacroix, Degas and, beyond these masters, those of the Renaissance and also of the seventeenth century – let us think in particular of Poussin, a master of drawing. However, this accomplished classicism is in turn reread in the light of older masters because of the deliberate archaism that the artist uses to compose his work and add his pictorial touch. The pigment here is either light and discreet or densely applied, in a falsely hesitant manner, as on the borders, the base, but also the runners that melt into the two silhouettes. If cubism is present here, it is in the form of a hidden memory to be determined by the eye of the informed viewer. We are here in a pre- and post-history of the avant-gardes, and ”Thus is the experience of territory. And of sexual territory. And of return. And of ‘homeland’ ”, as Derrida masterfully writes in her work Geschlecht III. Session 13. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative