皮爾·羅伊認領

This is portraiture at one remove: a painting of an imagined carved likeness. In it Pierre Roy turns his friend and fellow-artist, the mosaicist Boris Anrep, to stone. Through a characteristic manipulation of perspective, Roy manages to convey a sense of monumentality to the bust, which appears to tower over the studio behind. Though the painted sculpture is solemn and restrained, Roy’s perspective creates an odd effect like a cinematic zoom in which an object is suddenly brought into dramatic focus.

Like several of the Surrealists, with whom he exhibited in 1925, Pierre Roy used a precise style to portray an uncertain reality. A Naturalist’s Study alludes to the nineteenth-century concern with scientific classification and order. However, the relationship between these curious objects, including a paper snake and a string of eggs, remains mysterious. The artist’s son described this work as portraying a strangely motionless world: ‘Life seems to have stopped and become fixed like the locomotive itself in front of a chance or imaginary obstacle’.