Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec & David Bellos

Author:Georges Perec & David Bellos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Publishing
Published: 2014-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Foundering brutally at full steam, as if the whole world or, if not the world, then the moderately sickening universe of the room were plunging into the void, the laboratory, that immense and empty studio, re-emerged as another kind of prison: a microcosm featuring contradictions drawn, quartered and individually displayed on a wall, as if, in fine, those evil, clunky reproductions of the Condottiere on the high, sheer walls, those reduplicated images of a face of triumph and control, were, on reflection, ill-matched by the living image of failure on the unfinished panel set on its special easel with its four corners protected by a triple sheath of cotton wool, rag cloth and metal angle-piece at the carefully contrived focal point of six small spotlights: it didn’t show unity restored, the mastery of the world or inalterable permanence, but instead, a mere frozen flash – as if catching sight of itself in a moment of clarity – portraying the fundamental anguish of blind force, the sourness of cruel might, and doubt. It made it seem that Antonello da Messina had wanted, in total disregard of the most obvious law of history and four hundred years before time, to express in their incomplete fullness all the anguished contradictions of consciousness. Every contradiction under the sun seemed to have settled into the mirror of the face portrayed, but they were just absurd, insignificant contradictions precisely because they were expressed through techniques that should have only ever been adequate to portray unambiguous certainties. The painting did not show a warlord looking beyond the portraitist towards the world with all the irony, cruelty and impassiveness of a mind at one with itself; it did not reveal a painter who had summoned up in palpable form and structure above and beyond his model the eternal, rational stability of a Renaissance: it was the double, triple, quadruple game of a fake artist pastiching his own pastiche, but by transcending pastiche and reaching out beyond his subject and beyond his own intellectual grasp and ambition, finding only the murky ambiguity of his own self. Impassiveness had turned into panic, the relaxed firmness of the muscles had come out as lockjaw, the look of confidence had become arrogance and the firmness of the mouth now expressed revenge. Every detail was no longer an integral element of an irreducibly transcendent totality, but just a flimsy and fleeting trace of a man’s will strained to breaking point, a will that was itself rendered untrue by its development, wearing ever thinner as the superficial impression of completeness gave way to distorting elements which by virtue of their power and ambiguity undermined, point by point, the apparent harmony of the ensemble. This was not an artist grasping the world and his own self in a single glance; it was the somewhat haphazard and decidedly murky back-and-forth of a constructed ambiguity, of a hoax, of a crude piece of fakery, where the artist was just a minor demon of truth made uncertain, the

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