LA LONGUE ATTENTE, 2023

Caroline de Boissieu  

One eye stares at us, the other barely discernible; and along the cheek, dark streaks flow like tears—or the trace of time slowly altering the image. Photography inspired this portrait; it dissolves as the gaze descends: half the face transforms into landscape, vegetation, living matter.
This is the work's true power: this metamorphosis where the figure merges with nature, where skin becomes foliage, moss, and earth. To see this image is to decipher, within the visible, the presence of an absence—a being suspended between appearance and disappearance, between flesh and the world that surrounds it. Ink and acrylic are layered in strata of transparency, making the deep greens, golds, and bursts of light vibrate.
True to its title, the work speaks of waiting: this suspended moment, this patient melancholy where the face seems to watch for a horizon we cannot see. Between gentleness and gravity, the tangible and the imaginary, all tensions are present. A work of profound and poetic beauty, which leaves the viewer with great freedom of interpretation and invites them to project themselves into this gaze, at the borders of the conscious and the unconscious—as in a waking dream.
The work is mounted on Dibond, a support widely used in contemporary art, and placed in a black American-style frame.