Half Remembered

One side of the face is precise, almost photographic. Skin, freckles, one clear green eye. Then the image fractures down the middle and gives way to scraped paint, gray washes, dry brush, and ghostly fragments of another face trying to surface through the damage.

That tension gives the piece its charge.

The mood brings to mind Gerhard Richter, especially his fascination with blurred photographs and the unreliability of memory. There’s also a little Francis Bacon in the sense of a face being pushed, smeared, and psychologically disturbed, while the layered surface has echoes of Antoni Tàpies, who treated texture, scratches, and rough materials as part of the language of the work.

Here’s the art lesson hiding in all that abrasion: subtraction can be a form of drawing. Artists don’t always build an image by adding marks. They scrape, sand, wipe, erase, cover, and expose. The missing information becomes active. Your brain starts filling in the gaps.

And brains are very good at that.