Darth Revan helmet and helmetless — Print & Oil Painting

Two versions of one man share a single canvas, stacked one behind the other, and the picture is entirely about which of them is in front.

The masked figure occupies the upper half and is painted almost entirely in shadow: hood up, shoulders squared, cloak spreading out to both edges, and the mask itself a dark plate with a red muzzle grille and two narrow slits where the eyes belong. It reads as a monument rather than as a person.

Directly in front of it and lower sits the same head without the mask, and the handling changes completely. This is flesh: a bearded man in middle age with the hood up, lit magenta from the left and gold from the right, looking straight out at the viewer with an expression that is neither hostile nor friendly.

Two hilts are held upright in front of his chest, both ignited, red on one side and blue on the other, each blade a white core inside a coloured halo, and both weapons are rendered closely enough to count the rings on the emitters. Behind everything, a violet nebula with a crescent world at the left and a pale sun burning at the right.

The subject is a man who was both of those things in sequence and then in reverse, which no single portrait can hold. Setting one head over the other and letting the two blades cast opposing votes is the neatest solution available. Part of our Star Wars collection, next to that mask brought right up to the picture plane and the same two colours crossed rather than parallel.