The Haunting Mask — Print & Oil Painting

Fine straight lines have been ruled right across the surface, dozens of them, running corner to corner and passing behind and in front of the subject without any regard for it. They are the first thing the eye picks up and they are what stops the image settling: a face keeps trying to form and a net of geometry keeps cutting through it.

Under that net, bone. A pale mask emerges out of near black, worked in cold blue-white with the brush left visible everywhere: a brow ridge, the bridge of a nose, a cheek, a jaw hinge, and one enormous empty socket that is nothing more than the unpainted dark showing through.

The other socket has been filled. A ring of gold sits in it with a smaller ring inside that, and the two of them are the only closed shapes in the entire picture. Around them, gold pins and rust-coloured filaments scatter down the left side like the remains of a fitting that once held the thing together.

The lower half breaks up completely: teeth or tusks in pale strokes, a dark cavity, then nothing. It is a very abstract piece for a collection this literal, and it holds at large sizes for the same reason it is hard to read at small ones. From our Elden Ring collection, next to the polished gold helm, where the same idea is stated as ornament, and the burning figure, where the same handling is turned on a body.