With face frozen in a hilarious grin, his recurrent figure borrows the painter’s own features, in an exacerbated form of self-mockery. Sporting a huge, aggressively white set of teeth, this monstrous, often cloned figure never loses his troubling, outsized grin, which recalls both the radiant smiles used in western advertising and Communist propaganda’s enthusiastic faces. Whether meant to challenge or to shock, this perpetual, enigmatic laugh, which may also recall Buddha’s smile, compels the spectator to ponder over most existential questions about the meaning (or lack of meaning) of life.
Text : Carole Vantroys.
Translation : Pamela Hargreaves.
