Fierce harpies
After the
hornbills and cassowaries, here are the harpies as birds of (bad) company for
this new self-portrait! But where are we? On the stage of a subsidized play? Is
this a representation of Hell? The red of the room lets him imagine… Alongside
the painter, the harpies appear enormous and frightening. Their large faces
evoke hyper expressive Asian theater masks. Sitting in a very uncomfortable
position, in a long black bathrobe, the artist gives us a worried and perhaps
even imploring look.
Many themes
cross the web.
The
daughters of Typhon are not three but four here: perhaps a synthesis between
the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and the mythological deities of devastation
... Would we be on the verge of suffering a divine punishment whose plagues we
see in come from global warming?
This young
woman in a black silk negligee on a red background with the shadow of her chair
that looks like that of the grim reaper ... Could this be a new interpretation
of the young girl and death? A new representation of the oxymoron couple of
Eros and Thanatos? After Reflektor which questioned the aging of the artist, we
are now immersed in a new questioning of our coming end.
But perhaps
we are already after death, in a Sartrean huis-clos where the harpies are
allegorical figures of judges, of evil women, who torment the young woman in a
hell that has no end?
In short, a
very dark canvas, charged with this ambivalent energy of red, far from the
positivity of dazzling colors to which the painter has accustomed us.
