Damon Albarn 2000

Julian Opie made this portrait of Damon Albarn, and you can see it’s all about smooth surfaces and bold lines, right? It’s like Opie’s distilled Albarn down to the bare essentials, which is its own kind of art-making, I think. Look at how flat everything is, the way Opie simplifies the planes of Albarn’s face, the colors are blocked in so perfectly, and outlined with that heavy black line. The paint is opaque and smooth, so there's no visible texture. You can’t see the hand of the artist. You get the sense that it's more like a graphic design than a painting. And those eyes! Those pupils are like perfect circles, dots that stare right through you. The more you look, the more the abstraction reveals itself. Opie often makes these portraits from photographs, tracing and simplifying the images into these iconic representations. This portrait is very reminiscent of Warhol's pop art portraits, which also embraced flatness and commercial printing techniques. It makes you consider the space between the real person and their image.