by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Frenhofer’s dream

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Frenhofer’s dream. 30x30cm. Pencil. Chalk. Khadi paper From Balzac's novella The Unknown Masterpiece Several frames within this composition, which itself has no frame, determine several scales corresponding to the different stages, brought together in the same drawing. In the largest frame, surrounded by a deep, inky black, overflowing here and there in the drawing, the viewer can see Frenhofer kneeling, his long, muscular and tortuous arm extended by his hand clasped on a brush with which he paints in pink the voluptuous, semi-elongated figure of his model, who raises her head, but whose face is blurred. Likewise, Frenhofer’s face, indistinguishable beneath its tangle of lines, like the fine network of a spider’s web. Both faces and bodies are light brown. The pink paint Frenhofer uses only partially tints the model’s body, the contours of her legs, her anal hole… She seems passive and abandoned, but the old painter holds her firmly. Finally, the colour pink fills the whole frame of this upper part of the composition, when black does not encroach on the space.Further down, a change of scale, justified by the fact that it is a painting on an easel. In contrast to the scene in Frenhofer’s dream, the work here is ‘really’ done by the painter, the model lying down, her left arm bent over her head, carrying like a skull of a dying woman, a cry coming out of her mouth, that of condemnation. Has she endured such torment, posing for the old painter, that she opens her mouth to indicate her suffering? This time, in any case, her body, defined or not by a very fine line, also light brown, is painted entirely in pink. With only small and very partial areas left blank. It should be noted that the left leg and foot of the model painted by Frenhofer in his dream encroaches on this painting in its frame, linking in a surprising way the two temporalities, the two spaces, the dream and the reality of the work of art. This thus breaks the fluid reading to which the old masters have accustomed us, since here everything merges, and the different scales, brought together in the same composition, confuse the eye to the utmost. Once again, this phenomenon as well as the inverted poses of the model and the dexterity of the line speak to us of the Real and its double, and raise many questions to which only a long research in the history of art would, one could claim, allow us to find answers.This quest seems to me to be in vain. Quite simply because this remarkable drawing is the fruit of the artist’s personal obsessions, belongs only to him, and his models, whatever they may be, are as much the result of his references and his infinite erudition as of his own cosmogony, of his own research, so new in our century, which no doubt, thanks only to him, will not know the death of art. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative