Abstract Masks; diptych

John Banting is a painter of traces. Here the body is either disappearing or reappearing through fragments which are reconstructing it. A face is reduced to its outline - a typical feature of Banting's work as when he sewed ropes to delineate faces. The whole of the composition is perfectly balanced, which shows his training at an early stage of his life (he was 27 at the time) - the black trapeze at the top echoing the black line at bottom right, or the two small orange lines on the other panel creating a nice equilibrium, or the two triangles in the two panels, one black the other grey, or the "pinkish-coloured" bodies, one misshapen, the other geometric, creating a movement from one panel to the other. The present work was painted in 1929, the year of the famous Bruno Hat hoax in which he was involved. The whole composition is reminiscent of Man Ray's works: Banting had met him when in Paris in 1922 or 1923 and admired his work in which, like here, abstraction appears through the tension between the geometric and the representational. Few works by Banting remain from this period and this is a particularly interesting and quietly powerful example.

We are very grateful to Michel Remy for preparing this catalogue entry.