Page 68 - B-ALL#39 ENGLISH

Some portraits look silently, questioning the people who contem- plate them, others seem absent or focused on other parts of the canvas in front of present or imaginary objects or interlocutors. The artists focus their compositions around the final rendering that the model has chosen to honor his memory.
All of them tell us about beings long since disappeared and who owe their immortality only to the talents of the painters whose services they paid to pass to posterity.
Remembrance and forgetting are at the heart of this magnificent fresco of our humanity, of this visceral fear of the aftermath, of this fatal moment when the body is absent to become a tumult of emotions in the heart of those closed to us and contemporaries before disappearing with them to make room for new generations.
After centuries of stillness, these portraits still vibrate with that flame of flesh, a dream of immortality. Troubling and moving ...
Jan Jansz Mostaert, Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?), ca. 1525 - ca. 1530. Rijksmuseum