Virtual gallery
1952, Self – Portrait in the lumber jacket
Encre sur Calque | Collection particulière
From his stay at Gleizes’s, Mennessons had kept a series of works on plain paper or on tracing paper which he regarded as studies. In some of them, Gleizes had made corrections on his pupil’s work, but others are totally Mennessons’s, like this self-portrait. The face is in the shape of a triangle (it was the nickname given to Mennessons and he used a triangle to sign potteries in 1968 and 1969) and the body is bundled up in a winter garment, treated as a kind of strait-jacket made up of overlapping rectangles. From this kind of cage, the spectator’s eyes rise to the artist’s eyes which stare at him without any complaisance. The self-portrait is hemmed in by mathematical figures that give it strictness and save it from affectation. In this work, the transferring of the planes has an expressionistic touch.
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