The Picture of Dorina Gary
2026
Oil on linen
80 x 80 cm • 31.5 x 31.5 in
First painting in my new series, Transient Decoherences and Fundamental Obsessions, this pivotal work revisits the blue and the theme so characteristic of the Fractals, only to break free of them. At least on the surface.
The Picture of Dorina Gary, an anagram of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverses the novel's plot. It is the portrait that retains its youth while the model ages.
The painter, both model and creator of her work, dedicates her life to capturing the image of her past beauty. A sacrifice of the present for the future, the work, however, does not preserve its author: it consumes her.
Dorina, who spends the time she has left trying to freeze the time she has lost, is a prisoner of her own image, to the point of renouncing life outside her art. Beyond a reflection on the self-denial sometimes required by the act of creation, it is also a critique of self-obsession and vanity, fuelled by the cult of beauty imposed on women in our Western societies.
The brush on young Dorina's throat, her gaze desperate and raised towards a future whose tragedy she already seems to foresee, evokes a scalpel and embodies a latent violence and an ultimately destructive act. The drops of blood make visible the price of sacrifice.
In Wilde's work, the knife is the instrument with which Dorian attempts to destroy his image and the one that will cause his death. Here, the brush-scalpel is the tool with which Dorina relentlessly creates her own image - supposedly eternal - and the one that gradually annihilates her, much like Claude Lantier in Émile Zola's novel, The Masterpiece.
The vegetation around her, beginning to wither and fade before the vibrant, static flowers of her portrait, reinforces the link between the beauty of youth and the cruelty of passing time.
The black cat, a feminist nod to “women who will end up alone with their cats”, evokes ageism, and also, of course, witchcraft and the Faustian pact.
What will remain of us after our death? A tribute to Oscar Wilde and to his critique of vanity, The Picture of Dorina Gary, in a playful mise en abyme, obliterates the artist's present, leaving only the narrow image of her vain past.
