Eternal Staring

#73014     42 X 29″     mmp

• Petrus Christus: “Portrait of a Young Girl”, Berlin, Staatliche Museum
• Miro: “The Harlequin’s Carnival”, 1924-25
• Picasso: “Recumbent Nude”, 1942

Riddles, riddles, riddles.
The young girl derived from the shadowy Flemish artist Petrus Christus (d.1473) seems as enigmatic as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.Chen puts her inside an austere black box, as if she were an object trapped in a wall composed of miscellaneous contrivances by the late American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1900-1989).

He surrounds this head coffin with a storm of clowns and taunts her with a Cubist rendering of a nude woman, as if to suggest two sides of morality, the prim and the carnal.
The top of the girl’s hat is outside the box. Does that mean she can escape to the clowns? To temptations?

Play with this piece. You can conjure more questions than you can answers.