Jeune figue posant pour Leonard de Vinci 1946

Felix Labisse painted "Jeune figue posant pour Leonard de Vinci," and the title alone suggests a process of posing, seeing, and responding. Labisse’s color palette is unreal, and slightly sickening: fleshy pinks and greens are smoothed into an academic painting style but this juxtaposition only heightens the unsettling quality of the work. Look at the subject’s head, which has been sliced open like a ripe fig, the interior rendered with a fleshy rawness against the smoothness of the surface. It's this tension between the real and the surreal, the beautiful and the grotesque, that really grabs you. The painting is reminiscent of Dali or Magritte, but Labisse is doing something different, exploring the strangeness of the human form and the power of the imagination. Art isn't about answers, it's about questions, about opening up new ways of seeing and feeling the world.