Eunuch + Faust by Amy Bessone
Artist: Amy Bessone
Works: Eunuch and Faust
Year: 2008
Medium: Oil on canvas
Eunuch: 190.5 × 139.7 cm
Faust: 172.7 × 127 cm
Location: Saatchi Gallery, London
Born: New York, 1970
Amy Bessone's Eunuch and Faust are two strange men.
Title: Eunuch | Artist: Amy Bessone - Photo by Nadia Bouzid
Faust has a pointed beard, heavy eyebrows and what looks like a cape. Eunuch has a thin moustache and some sort of headpiece that is much harder to place. Both look like portraits. The obvious question is who they are.
Bessone painted them in 2008, the same year as her first solo exhibition in New York at Salon 94. The show was called With Friends Like These, and the cast was unusual. Faust and the eunuch appeared alongside a dandy, a raccoon and a white faced dancer styled after Josephine Baker. Salon 94 described them as a theatrical troupe.
They were characters rather than conventional sitters, and Bessone was finding them in images and objects that already existed. Faust, for example, was based on a figurine. You would not necessarily know it from the painting. He looks less like a piece of porcelain than a man dressed for some production whose story we have missed.
When Christie's later sold Faust, the catalogue pointed to his exaggerated eyebrows, pointed beard and costume and made a connection to Commedia dell'arte. It is useful because the theatrical quality is already there in the painting. The cape, the face and even the pose feel like part of a role.
Title: Faust | Artist: Amy Bessone - Photo by Nadia Bouzid
Eunuch is more difficult. There is no identified sitter in the published material and no reliable explanation I could find for the headpiece or moustache. They look like clues, which makes it tempting to assign the figure a place or period. Ottoman, Persian and Byzantine references all come to mind, but without evidence they are guesses. Salon 94 identifies him simply as a eunuch.
The original Salon 94 exhibition was split between two locations. At the main gallery Bessone showed three semi clad women whose poses referred to classical sculpture. The more peculiar group, including Faust and the eunuch, was shown at Freeman Alley. She was taking figures from sculpture, photographs, reproductions and decorative objects and putting them into paintings without completely removing the histories or oddities they arrived with.
The size matters too. Faust is 172.7 centimeters high, about five feet eight inches. Eunuch is 190.5 centimeters, about six feet three. They are not particularly large paintings. They just happen to be very close to the size of actual people.
Bessone was born in New York in 1970 and studied at Barnard College before continuing her studies in Paris and Amsterdam. Her work includes sculpture as well as painting, which is worth knowing here since some of these painted figures began as objects rather than people.
What makes Eunuch and Faust interesting is that they seem much more specific than they actually are. The names are specific. The faces are specific. So are the moustache, beard, cape and headpiece. Everything suggests there should be a person and a story behind each one.
There isn't, at least not in the usual portrait sense. Faust came to Bessone already as a character and an object. The eunuch remains harder to pin down. They look like two men with histories. They may be better understood as two histories given faces.
Amy Bessone, the Artist:
Born in 1970, New York, NY
Lives and works, Los Angeles, CA
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