Skulls

Skulls is a work composed of a variation of thirty-six painted skulls. Its theme, a vanitas, a memento mori, causes the visitor to recoil, but the serial effect of its installation in the museum space fascinates. Each with its own angle, its own personality, the skulls fix the viewer with their disconcertingly expressive orbits.

The work is based on the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday. She was imprisoned and then guillotined: her skull and brain were preserved and used for experiments. Skulls invites the viewer to approach each of the small paintings that make up the series, hung at eye level, the level of our own cranium, in order to observe them individually, in their singularity, while recognizing in them the terminal fusion of fates inherent in the human condition, death.

The Skulls ensemble is presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in the Ouverture exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2021.