Vijf vrouwenhoofden 1891 - 1941

Here we have Leo Gestel's "Five Women's Heads," a small drawing made with pencil on paper, sometime in the early 20th century. It feels like a sketch, something made to work out ideas, the kind of drawing an artist might make in their studio as part of a longer process. The marks are simple, direct, and kind of reductive. It’s all about the essentials here. Check out how he uses just a few lines to suggest the volume of the heads and the direction of their gaze. The faces appear and disappear, as though emerging from a haze. This gives the drawing a dreamy quality, as though we're seeing these women in a fleeting moment of reverie. Gestel seems to be in conversation with artists like Cezanne, who used repetition and multiple perspectives to explore the underlying structure of things. Like Cezanne, he seems to be less interested in capturing a likeness than in finding a way to show the hidden architecture of perception.