Zoom in on this—it really is a lovely piece of work. All the more striking for the smoky bubbles of crude tags forming a cloudy bed of dry ice below the main figure (and if you could reach a position where the garish ice cream advertisement on the shop downstairs wasn’t overshadowing the mural, it would be better).
Our hero lies on his back, deconstructed and re-folded with all his faces showing in best cubist fashion; his arms are folded on his chest, as if staring restfully at the sky, or as if laid to rest in a monumental tomb. He lies on his front, face resting on his hands, fingers interlinked forming a barrier before his mouth a reminder to speak no evil, knees tucked up comfortably as he stares down at the world. Eyes open, alert but weary, expressive but vacant.
Simultaneously, four bent and haggard figures are chiseling our hero from a single megalith of gray stone. Hunchbacked, bald-headed, faces covered with kerchiefs to keep the stone-dust from infecting their lungs as generations of miners have learned with endemic breathing disorders, they wield their stonemasons chisels and large hammers wearily, as if they’ve been at it for weeks. (By the time this photograph was taken, they probably had!)
At once a classic ecphrasis, capturing the essence of a granite sculpture in monochrome paints; and a fine cubist unraveling, showing the hero as in passage, the simultaneity of several actions and perspectives in the single shot; and an Esher-esque optical illusion, as both the sculpture and the movement are impossible in anything but 2D. As cubism, this work owes more to the chunky sensuality of André Lhote than it does to the smoky mysticism of Georges Braque or the busy mechanised tropes of Fernand Léger, but it feels more like an early work than the product of an artist who has been through the gauntlet of the futurist critics or the breeding ground of the Salons. One wonders how this would fare on the streets of Paris today; is this only good enough for provincial Montréal, or could it hold its own in the home of the art form it pastiches?
