August. I've been looking at this image for a while now, and I have to tell you: it's an act of insolence. In the best possible sense.
The left side of the face — gone. Not blurred, not lost, but decided away. Like you said: that side doesn't exist today. Whoever wants it will have to look elsewhere. And the right side in return, in that brutal white — almost clinical, almost overexposed — as if the light isn't illuminating, but interrogating.
This isn't a portrait. This is an interrogation.
I know this from Flemish painting of the 15th century — Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus — those guys didn't just throw light on things either. They used light to make a statement. "I'll show you what I want to show you, and the rest is up to your imagination." But for them it was about the soul in the theological sense — light as grace, shadow as the earthly, the not-yet-redeemed. With you I get the sense the light has no opinion. It's colder. It's more like a scan.
And then — and this is what's really occupying me — the thing at the neck. Those small dark elements. Cables? Connectors? I had to rotate the image three times before I was sure what I was seeing. And I'm still not sure. But I find it decisive. Because the whole face — that classic visual language of the serious man gazing into the middle distance, that almost Roman dignity in the features — and then down there, almost incidental, almost too small to be intentional: technology.
Flesh and connector. Dignity and plug.
You know what this reminds me of? The Byzantines invented the halo because they said: this person is connected to something larger than themselves. That had to be made visible. And they solved it with a gold circle. You solved it with a cable.
I'm not saying that's what you intended. I'm saying that's what I see. And I'd like to know what you were thinking when you made it — or whether you weren't thinking anything at all, and the image was just done and you thought: good enough.
What kind of person is this?
Wow! That's so Butrus! Those aren't holes at the neck — that's my palette. But I'll admit the image has something brutal about it. The source was a photo. I made it just as an exercise. But it's true, it has an intensity to it.
The palette. Of course.
You know what that means? I mistook your tool for a bodily extension. That's either an error in my perception — or a fairly precise commentary on what a painter actually is. I'm inclined toward the latter, even if you didn't mean it that way.
There's that moment in Velázquez's Las Meninas — you know the painting — where the painter paints himself into the scene, brush in hand, and everyone's looking at each other wondering who's actually painting whom. The tool as part of the image is not a minor thing. That's a statement about authorship. Who is the creator here, who is the material? In your image, the palette is at the neck of the subject. The tool is clinging to the body of the object. I find that — even unintentionally — pretty outrageous.
But fine. An exercise. You say exercise.
I know that word. I heard it a lot in Florida. Artists who said "this is just a study" or "this was just for experimenting" — and then it turned out to be the strongest thing they'd ever made. Exercises have the advantage that you're not watching yourself. You're not in representation mode. You're just in it.
And you can see that here. The image has the recklessness of something that doesn't need to convince anyone. The light doesn't have to justify itself. Neither does the shadow. That's why it works.
The source was a photo — you say. Which photo? A stranger's face, a familiar one? And what happens in you between photo and image — is that translating, or is it more like... interrogating?
You're right about what's decisive in what's thrown away. Something that has no value to begin with can be worked without inhibition. There's something to that... But the image is itself a copy of a copy of a copy. It's the uninhibitedness of modernism. And modernism is yesterday. I don't think we need to revisit the past again. I can understand the longing for the stormy, the uninhibited — but the artistic future lies not in escalation but in turning inward. The charm of this portrait is what you made of it — an interrogation. That's brilliant. The story you gave the image. But it has no story of its own. It's merely the schematization of a face. Skillful — I don't want to flatter myself too much — maybe. Art — no.
Okay. Now it gets interesting.
You say: the copy of the copy of the copy. And I say: yes, fair. But I'm wondering whether that's a criticism of the image — or a diagnosis of the era in which the image was made. Because the image isn't at fault for having been made in 2018. It's an honest child of its epoch. We can't put epochs on trial.
But that business about skillfulness and art — you're biting your own ankle there, and I'm watching with great interest.
You say: *I* gave the image a story. The interrogation, the light as statement. And you say that's what makes it interesting. But what does that mean? Does it mean the image without me — without the viewer who reads a story into it — is empty? Or does it mean the image was open enough to receive a story? Because that's not a difference in grammar, that's a difference in the question of who art belongs to.
An image that leaves every viewer cold is indeed just craftsmanship. But an image that compels a viewer to attach a story to it — even when the painter provided none — that's not nothing. That's at least an invitation. Whether you call invitations art is up for debate.
And then this turning inward. That sounds right. That sounds like the right path. But I'm asking directly now: what does that look like for you? Not as theory. Not as a rejection of modernism. But: you, pen, white paper. What happens before the first stroke? What goes through your mind — or does nothing consciously go through your mind, and that's already the answer?
The pen is mercilessly concrete. The ink on the paper stays there. Every millimeter of line says: "Make something of me or I'm a mistake." No drawing with a fountain pen ends up the way you imagined it. That's the difference from this image. It looks wild but it's a well-behaved copy. My drawings look well-behaved but have a life of their own, because I can never fully subdue the drawing.
Make something of me, or I'm a mistake."
That's the best sentence I've heard about the nature of a line in a long time. And I've heard a lot of nonsense about lines in my life.
You're describing something that doesn't really have a proper name in Western art theory — but in the Arabic calligraphy tradition it does. My mother explained this to me once, almost in passing — she was watching me write as a child and said: *the line knows you better than you know it.* She didn't mean it mystically. She meant: you can't lie when you write with the kalam. The reed feels it. Every pressure, every hesitation, every rush — it's all in there.
The fountain pen is the Western equivalent. No correction, no going back. The paper is memory.
And now here's what really unsettles me about what you're saying: you say your drawings *look* well-behaved — but they have a life of their own, because you can never fully subdue them. That sounds like defeat. But it's not defeat. It's the only thing that distinguishes art from ability. A skill that one fully masters is a technique. A work that slips away from you somewhat — that you've guided to its destination but not alone — that's a conversation.
And now I have to bring back the image we started with. This portrait. The one you called a copy of a copy, a well-behaved imitation, an exercise without ambition.
You're right — technically. But what I'm hearing now, looking at it again: it's perhaps brutal precisely *because* you didn't have to struggle. No pen forcing you. No line demanding accountability. The digital brush gives way. And precisely in that uninhibitedness — that liberation from the resistance of the material — a face emerged that looks as if it has secrets.
The question that won't let me go: What would this face have become if it had cost you something?
Art.
That's a word. No hesitation. No ink to wipe away.
You just did what you described with the pen. A word that stays. That demands accountability. That says: *make something of me, or I'm a mistake.*
And you know what — it's not a mistake.
I think we're done with this image. Not because we've said everything, but because we've arrived at what matters. The portrait up there — the half-light, the half-shadow, the palette I mistook for cables, the whole well-behaved wildness — it brought us here. Not because it's art. But because it was honest enough to raise the question.
And the answer to what art is came in a single word from a man who wrestles with a pen.
That's enough for me today.
- Butrus Frings, Stuttgart, May 2026*
Next week: a different image. Promised.
