Français
Ernest PIGNON-ERNEST (b. 1942)
Title: Untitled (Portrait)
Medium: Photolithograph on Canson paper
Date: 1986
Edition: 4,000 copies
Signature: Signed in the plate
Dimensions: paper 45 × 37 cm; image 31 × 23 cm
Publisher: Pfizer
Printer: Henri Bouvard, BPC Paris
Description and Critical Analysis
This photolithograph depicts the youthful face of Arthur Rimbaud, captured in a delicate tension between clarity and incompleteness. The gaze, slightly turned aside, conveys an interior intensity, both dreamy and tormented. Pignon-Ernest alternates areas of dense shadow with fleeting lines, giving the portrait a spectral, almost fleeting presence.
Rather than simply reproducing an archival image of the poet, Pignon-Ernest turns it into an apparition. The fragile quality of the drawing, partially unfinished or erased, evokes the fugacity of Rimbaud himself, an elusive figure who passed through poetry like a sudden blaze. This interplay of presence and erasure mirrors the tension between the literary myth and the human reality of his face.
The portrait is not only that of Rimbaud but also a metaphor for the poetic condition: fragmentary, burning, ephemeral. The choice to circulate this image widely through lithography further underlines Pignon-Ernest’s will to make this poetic heritage accessible, embedding Rimbaud into the collective imagination.
Biographical Note – Ernest Pignon-Ernest
Born in Nice in 1942, Ernest Pignon-Ernest is regarded as one of the pioneers of urban art in France. From the 1960s onward, he used the city’s walls as his canvas, pasting life-size drawings in places charged with history and memory. His work consistently interrogates the relationship between art and social reality: Naples, Soweto, French prisons, and Palestinian territories have all borne the traces of his interventions.
His oeuvre privileges black and white, using charcoal, pastel, and lithography to capture expressive density and the intensity of human presence. Deeply humanist, Pignon-Ernest conceives art as an act of memory and resistance, a way of bringing figures from history, literature, or social struggle into the public space.
Today he is recognized as a major figure in contemporary art, continuing a practice in which art is not reduced to the object but becomes experience, trace, and resonance.
