by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Seated woman

0.0 x 0.0

Seated woman. 20x20cm, charcoal The composition shows a seated naked woman, her legs crossed in a dynamic movement, her two arms spread apart and joined together by her hands, confused, as if in prayer. Her tilted head, crowned by a high bun from which a few locks of hair escape, reveals fine and delicate features, a pointed chin, and evokes, as often do the faces drawn by John Gorman, that of the women in the silent films of the 1920s. Her breasts are generous but without excess, the left breast being as if crushed and split by a large scar or open wound. Behind her, like a wink to Matisse, a sort of tapestry and screen, defined only by a few lines, a few zigzags, and perhaps the beginning of an empty painting or mirror in the upper left corner. It is therefore an interior scene in the manner of a Manet, a Degas, a Cézanne, a Matisse or a Picasso, but here the pictorial treatment intervenes, which distances this scene considerably from these models. Indeed, this seated woman, perhaps praying, is defined by a series of lines, sometimes fluid, sometimes broken and chopped, sometimes like forearms and hands, dissipating into a bundle of features so fine and inextricable that only the viewer’s informed gaze can identify them as such. Here and there, sinuous traces appear, as if the pale skin had been lacerated by a whip, scars are everywhere, and a thick line of deep black runs across his abdomen to resurface through his left knee. The legs themselves are not really defined, a few furtive, interrupted lines merely indicating them. Note that the zigzags and other signs running through the background merge with the woman’s body, which they gain, as if to deny any dichotomy between an exterior that would be the room, and an interior that would be the female nude. Beautiful and bruised, recollected and seemingly impervious to the arrows that crack her body, the seated woman remains impenetrable in her mystery, her acceptance of pain, that only her hands united in prayer seem capable of saving her from an inner hell that the external elements and signs clearly indicate to us. In this, she joins the great heroines of Greek tragedy, much more than the coquettes, ballerinas, bathers or bourgeois women of the references already mentioned. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative