Dean Fox’s Lady on the Grass: Berthe Morisot: A chaotic-form as an Otherness

Abstract

Dean Fox is a contemporary British artist whose representation of Lady on the Grass is a reinterpretation of Berthe Morisot’s Impressionist painting titled Reading. This article analyses Fox’s Lady on the Grass: Berthe Morisot as an abstract body of work that depicts a chaotic-form is being seen as an Otherness. It is a work of abstraction that minimalizes and deconstructs Morisot’s Impressionist traditional figural gestures as a topological exploration of reinvention as a poesis that navigates new possibilities of mapping creativity that exploits a spatiality of interconnectedness ‘knots, proximities, and continuities’ in order to set it free into the world (Serres 2019: 82). Through philosophical concepts that suggest an Otherness the paper discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘obscurity’ and ‘non-resemblance’, Michel Serres’s ‘mixture’ and ‘co-mingling’, and Édouard Glissant’s ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’ as postmodernist tendencies towards new ways of looking at figurative gestures. The paper challenges the assumptions behind what makes portraiture not defined through the western notions of realism but rather how it is being seen as a sensory opening in order to unveil new possibilities of feeling the Other. Contrary to a traditional reading of Fox’s Lady on the Grass is being seen as a non-rendering of mimesis, Nancy urges to read it as a disfiguration, Serres’s as a portrait of veil and Glissant’s as a poesis of relational interconnectedness.