WILL - Lot 54

WILL The Garden of Colors, Champaka 2012 The Bride, painted in the late 1980s, also published in Mirages by Daniel Maghen in 2017. Signed. Acrylic on canvas 90 × 63 cm (35.43 × 24.8 in.) It's a large format that expresses many things with humor. With its magnificent blue and white hues, it plays with wedding codes and their ironic inversion. The bride is shown lying down, not in the solemnity of the rite, but in a lascivious, almost theatrical pose. The white dress, symbol of purity and innocence, becomes a pretext for emphasizing curves, opening onto a provocative décolleté, contrasting with the expected rigidity of the nuptial image. The bouquet, carelessly placed, seems less the emblem of a sacred union than the prop of a social spectacle. In the background, a frame inserted into the canvas shows another scene: a black-and-white image of the "official" wedding, with the docile bride at her husband's side. This double register puts into tension the agreed ideal, frozen in a family photo, and the reality of a living, sensual woman, freed from this imposed role. The painting thus shifts from social document to intimate confession. Here, the bride doesn't wait to be contemplated in her virtue: she looks the viewer straight in the eye, lipstick bright, haughty carriage, at once sovereign and distant. It's a portrait of a woman reclaiming her body and her image at a time when tradition would like to reduce her to a social function. In Will's work - is this a "comic strip" effect? -every representation invites us to dream, to tell a story. This is rare and remarkable.