His commitment to the search for new pictorial approaches, accompanied by his performative work and extensive written documentation, have enshrined Arnulf Rainer as one of the most influential living artists. Always exalting the body language that painting implies, the artist highlights the first forms of human expression and, in the 1970s, he begins to photograph himself, creating a link between the theatrical and the graphic as a means of expression. Near to Viennese Actionism and exploring gestures through performance, he expands his practice to video, and begins painting with his hands, which will accompany him throughout his career. Mainly interested in automatism and the desire to destroy conventional communication in order to recover the richness of human expression, Arnulf Rainer bases his expressiveness on the concealment of images of other artists and self-portraits, reaching abstraction and almost total obscuration of forms. In this sense, his body of work has always aimed to free itself from its own limitations, even exceeding by the form of canvases the conventional standards.

With a selection of artworks spanning from 1970 to 2002, Visages reviews the importance of faces in the work of Arnulf Rainer through three different series: his self-portraits or Face Farces, the Death Masks or Totenmaskes and finally the veiled pictures or Schleierbildern, in which the artist uses as a departure point preexisting images from the history of art. With the prominence of the Face Farces, which depict a person who can only express himself through the movements of his body, in an attempt of the artist to dissolve himself, as a metaphoric gesture of the oblivion, completely deliberated, of what art is, this exhibition gathers a serie of works that insist the whole of art can find its origins in an artist. Either a naked man without any tools for the act of painting, overflowed by painting, either his gaze covering preexisting images. The overpaintings of the Schleierbilder are the physical trace of this gaze, without the intention of adding any further meaning to the previous image, but rather remove excess meaning anchored to the image through habits and historicization of art. Just as Cézanne, undaunted, observed his apples and his mountains, and day by day helped them to life in his painting, so too does Rainer tirelessly recounts what he observes, day by day, in art, paintings and life Jean–Michel Foray