Joker's Face in Textured Mixed-Media Art — Print & Oil Painting

There are at least four things stacked on top of one another here and the picture wants you to notice all of them. At the bottom, a photographic head. Over it, a woven canvas grain running edge to edge. Over that, a dense web of scratched coloured lines in orange, cyan, yellow and violet, drawn fast and crossing the face without regard for its features. And finally, drips: thin runs of red and blue that start at the top of the frame and travel down through everything.

The head underneath survives all of it. Chin lowered, brows down, eyes lifted so that the whites show underneath the iris, and a red mouth pulled wide across scarred cheeks. That upward look is the one piece of information the treatment cannot bury, and everything else in the picture is arranged to make you work for it.

The greasepaint has been recoloured by the process rather than painted. Patches of it read green, others pink or grey, and the black around the eyes has been broken up into blue and violet strokes, so the white face is no longer white anywhere. Only the shirt collar at the bottom edge keeps a plain dark value.

Hair fills both upper corners as tangled dark curls with orange scratched through them, and the lower corners open into loose spatter with nothing behind it. There is no background in any conventional sense: the surface simply stops describing a face and starts describing itself.

Read as process rather than as portrait, it is the most restless piece in this run. Part of our DC Universe collection, beside a cleanly airbrushed version of the same glare and another face broken down into visible strokes.