Alfonso Michel

The figure in this painting is more classical, and less aggressively faceted than his Nude of around 1948. The voluptuous woman, clutching at a draped white sheet, sits before an open window. Rather than creating a tropical context, Michel invests the figure and the setting with a more universal spirit. The architecture is simple and rustic, and beyond the window we see a schematic view of a harbor. In the upper right, a rectangular red form evokes an ocean barge, and on the left, emerging from the water, a tree trunk suggests the remnants of an unkempt pier. The melancholic quality of the scene is reinforced by the figure’s clutching gesture and terse, solemn expression, conjured by dark, empty eye sockets and a straight, expressionless mouth. Indeed the painting might refer to Arcady Boytler’s 1931 film "Woman of the Port" (La mujer del puerto), in which Michel worked as an extra, playing a sailor in a bar scene. The nude’s delicate head and features even have a passing resemblance to the film’s female lead, Andrea Palma. Though the nude’s head is carefully modeled in three dimensions, Michel flattens the figure’s arms and torso through overlapping geometric planes of red, pink and ochre. The contrast between the sculptural treatment of the face and the flattening of the torso is reinforced by the elongated massing of the figure’s arms, which further emphasizes the smallness of the her flaccid breasts and disproportionately small head. There is no articulation of her lower body. Instead, the drapery of the white sheet creates the contours of a clearly absent human form. In an overt reference to the two-dimensionality of his rendition, Michel tears open the corner of her right arm, revealing a view out to the ocean beyond. In doing so, he alludes to the possibility that rather than painting from flesh and blood, this nude is an enigma, rendered strictly from memory and imagination.