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 version of Rimbaud’s portrait by Ernest Pignon-Ernest stands out through its chromatic treatment, where sepia, blue, and ochre tones intermingle. The artist does not present a fixed face, but rather a shifting presence, almost aqueous, in which washes and transparencies give the poet an aura of legend.
The young Arthur’s features seem to emerge and dissolve within a cloud of color, as if his visage were melting into time. The effect is that of a fleeting apparition: an elusive Rimbaud, escaping the rigidity of the icon to become once again a living figure, traversed by light and shadow.
Beneath the main image, a photograph of the studio anchors the work in a documentary dimension, reminding us of Pignon-Ernest’s practice, always oscillating between memory and reactivation. The contrast between the fluid painterly portrait and the sharpness of the photograph emphasizes this dialogue between myth and reality, between poetic brilliance and material trace.
This lithograph perfectly embodies the essence of Pignon-Ernest’s artistic gesture: to make figures essential to history and culture reappear in our shared spaces, not as monuments but as fragile presences, forever in flux.
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 chose the street as his canvas, pasting life-size drawings in locations steeped in memory—prisons, staircases, building façades. His works are never decorative; they are conceived as poetic and political acts.
He has portrayed emblematic figures—Rimbaud, Pasolini, the martyrs of the Paris Commune—through drawings of striking intensity. His technique, rooted in charcoal, black and white, and washes, aims to bestow bodies and faces with an immediate and vibrating presence.
Today, Pignon-Ernest is recognized as a master of contemporary drawing, whose work fuses art with collective memory, and aesthetics with history. His Rimbaud portraits, whether pasted in urban space or published as lithographs, continue to embody this vision: art as a living, shared trace.
