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Descriptif du lot
Exhibited in Nicolas Party’s 2021 mid-career survey at the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Portrait (2020) subtly reinvents both the medium of pastel and the genre of portraiture. It depicts an unnamed figure before a hot pink background. While the character’s long black hair and the blush colour of their garment are typically feminine signifiers, Party has rendered the face androgynous. The skin is a rich golden yellow, adding an element of the uncanny. The face is rendered in delicate detail, capturing vivid green eyes, a slightly protruding chin and the fall of velvety light across the fine features. By contrast, the background, garment and hair are captured as crisp, almost Pop Art-esque fields of colour, forgoing pastel’s usual tendency for soft gradation. The figure’s eyes interrogate the beholder, like those in Vincent van Gogh’s celebrated self-portraits.
Born in French-speaking Switzerland and based between New York City and Brussels, Party is celebrated for his dreamlike pastels. Inspired by the musical technique of sampling and his youthful practice as a graffiti artist, he likes to pull in disparate references from across the history of art into his own work. He draws on traditional genres of painting such as landscape and still-life, but subtly defamiliarises and anthropomorphises the subjects he depicts. Fruits curl together like bodies seeking warmth, coffee pots consort and trees solicit empathy like human figures. The inverse process happens in his portraits, as people transform into art objects. ‘We ask ourselves,’ writes Stefan Banz, ‘whether the depicted figures are not in fact portraits of portraits or sculptures’ (‘Nicolas Party: Maker of Paradise’, in S. Aquin et al., eds., Nicolas Party, New York, 2022, p. 62).
Party’s use of soft pastel also disrupts expectations. It was a medium that enjoyed its heyday in the Rococo age, mastered by artists such as the Venetian miniaturist and portrait painter Rosalba Carriera. Made from pure pigment with a binder, pastel is characterised by its intense, natural colours. Party adopted it after an encounter with a Tête de femme (1921) by Pablo Picasso at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, an artwork whose impact has reverberated through his practice since. As Francesca Bernasconi writes: ‘The facial features that Party uses are those of the classical Picasso, with an eye to ancient statuary, to an ideal capable of blending male and female in order to breathe life into a substantially androgynous physiognomy’ (‘Portraits’, in Nicolas Party, Rovine, exh. cat., Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, 2021, p. 76). While Portrait playfully draws on these influences, it stands on its own as a beguiling, playful and idiosyncratic artwork by one of the most distinctive artists of our time.
Born in French-speaking Switzerland and based between New York City and Brussels, Party is celebrated for his dreamlike pastels. Inspired by the musical technique of sampling and his youthful practice as a graffiti artist, he likes to pull in disparate references from across the history of art into his own work. He draws on traditional genres of painting such as landscape and still-life, but subtly defamiliarises and anthropomorphises the subjects he depicts. Fruits curl together like bodies seeking warmth, coffee pots consort and trees solicit empathy like human figures. The inverse process happens in his portraits, as people transform into art objects. ‘We ask ourselves,’ writes Stefan Banz, ‘whether the depicted figures are not in fact portraits of portraits or sculptures’ (‘Nicolas Party: Maker of Paradise’, in S. Aquin et al., eds., Nicolas Party, New York, 2022, p. 62).
Party’s use of soft pastel also disrupts expectations. It was a medium that enjoyed its heyday in the Rococo age, mastered by artists such as the Venetian miniaturist and portrait painter Rosalba Carriera. Made from pure pigment with a binder, pastel is characterised by its intense, natural colours. Party adopted it after an encounter with a Tête de femme (1921) by Pablo Picasso at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, an artwork whose impact has reverberated through his practice since. As Francesca Bernasconi writes: ‘The facial features that Party uses are those of the classical Picasso, with an eye to ancient statuary, to an ideal capable of blending male and female in order to breathe life into a substantially androgynous physiognomy’ (‘Portraits’, in Nicolas Party, Rovine, exh. cat., Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, 2021, p. 76). While Portrait playfully draws on these influences, it stands on its own as a beguiling, playful and idiosyncratic artwork by one of the most distinctive artists of our time.