The Bath

A blend of two sources: Snyders for the setting — this market-stall frame where flesh is put on display without modesty — and Rubens' Three Graces for the figures, a circle of three gathered around a fountain. As with the exposure of flesh in L'Étal, the flesh here is human rather than animal. Each of the three graces expresses, in her own way and with an animal beside her like a totem, a different state: the uprightness of the one who holds back a foot, as if to preserve a threatened order; the languor of the one who takes up all the space and is not afraid to be there; the motherhood of the one with the round belly. Even though they share the same source — the doubled figure pouring on the left — each one's trajectory differs. The saturated red covering the whole canvas leaves no room to breathe: it is a bath that confines as much as it gathers, where three ways of inhabiting one collective body brush against each other without ever truly meeting, and sometimes even oppose one another.