The Faceless

As an obscure expressionist,Frank Auerbach’s works were full of crude daubs and heavy pigments,pursuing heavy,sculptural and touchable forms.His grotesque,thick-coated figures,like bloated beasts.He used paint as an accumulation that can feel the whole world,conveying a kind of materialization of the constant feeling.His creation to contain the hyperactive visual binary dialectical——tangible vision,digging novelty from extreme repeat,sober and madness,fiction and reality,his art never trusted rhetoric,style always used for him,all subjects are realism,but the form is very abstract,efforts to eliminate the external,visual effects,breakthrough the limitation of domesticating,seem real,conveys the authenticity of the characters of "beauty".Auerbach,as always,adheres to his stubborn,his bigoted and even morbid creation mode,ascetic painting process,and seeks new possibilities in the cycle of themes.The picture excludes the plot,neither realistic,nor a presumptuous expression of self.He reconstructs his facial grammar,eliminates facial features and makes them "faceless",thus transcending the image field of portrait painting for viewing.The face has its own life and becomes a de-dystopian and free image,which can be rotated in many dimensions such as image,timeliness and narration.Auerbach’s portraits are not individualized,but a symbiotic and contemporaneously living portrait,which tells the living state of human beings,unmodified to gain insight into the truth,and polish art out of the texture of life.This article tries to take the "faceless" portrait as the incise,to have a glimpse of Auerbach’s artistic thought,feel its silent but shocking development,and explore the new possibility of contemporary portraiture.