The grey glove – (Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro

Date: 1881

Size: 73 x 54 cm

Museum: National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museu do Chiado (Lisboa, Portugal)

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Of the first works executed in Paris this Luva Cinzenta portrays the older sister of the painter, Maria Augusta. The chiaroscuro returns to the painting of Columbano. The light is distributed over three distinct zones and separated by shaded blacks, whose density erases the half-tones and separates the illuminated fragments. The construction of the figure is done by parallel oblique lines, which create a dynamic posture of the model and define an instantaneity that can have as reference an interest in the work of Degas on movement and composition. The portrait is found in an approximation to the figure, which could well constitute a genre painting, since she is putting on or taking off a glove as a moment of a toilet. However, the more closed framework on the figure, making it perfectly recognizable, and its dynamism, characteristic of a surprised situation, provoke a hybridization of gender. The title follows the emphasis that the gray glove has visually. It is the prop that becomes the pretext of painting, a chromatic stain of deaf values and synthetic pointing that is played in the composition as a fetishist pictorial sign par excellence, around which the painting itself articulates. The contrast with the naturalism of the face and shadows that define it is striking. Thus, in many of these paintings of Paris the dominant pictorial motif is a clothing garment. The naturalism then fully assumed by his painting in the representations of the faces was a counterpoint to these elements that escaped this codification and brought a primacy of the stain to the core of the painting.