Portret van George-Eugène-Benjamin Clemenceau 1934 - 1936

Leo Gestel made this portrait of George Clemenceau with pen and ink on paper, and what strikes me is how the drawing is built up from these teeming marks. Look at the way those tiny lines pile up to give you a sense of Clemenceau's craggy face. It’s like Gestel is thinking through the act of drawing. There's a real material presence to those black lines, isn't there? They describe the form, but they also create a kind of buzzing texture. Zoom in and you can see it's like a dense thicket, almost vibrating with energy. And notice how Gestel uses the white of the paper to create highlights, like on the tip of the nose or the edge of the collar. It’s all about these contrasts, the interplay of black and white, light and shadow. Gestel's mark-making reminds me of Picasso's cubist drawings, particularly in the way he breaks down form into its constituent parts. Like Picasso, Gestel seems less interested in capturing a likeness than in exploring the very act of seeing. And that, for me, is what makes this portrait so compelling.