Portrait of a Frenchman 1971

Patrick Caulfield created this 'Portrait of a Frenchman' with flat planes of color outlined in black. It’s a bit like he's made a painting from a coloring book. Look at the face, that kind of mauve-y purple, set against the hot red and black. It's bold, it’s simple, and it's really about color relationships. Caulfield wasn't interested in blending or shading, so there's no real depth but there is a strange kind of pictorial space. The way the black outline defines those shapes, almost like stained glass, is pretty crucial to how this thing works. It reminds me a little of early Léger, with that same interest in flattening space. Both artists share the interest in making paintings which are bold, cool and a bit detached from reality. In the end, art isn’t really about what you see, but how you see it, and maybe what happens when we put our own weird spin on things.