One fundamental principle of contemporary art is originality, and the relationship between the original and originality lies at the heart of these reprises. Some works summon a déjà-vu from the eighteenth century, while others operate as agencies of possibility and impossibility, confronting the modern condition of artistic representation. In continuity with the conceptual project, the paintings in the series Les Orphelines, through the inherited tradition of oil painting and its logic of play, call upon the recurrent visuality of a permanent continuum past-perspective of the present. Yet the object still reveals a performativity of its own.
In L'Orpheline, the figure appears caught between grief and apprehension, her gaze directed toward an event that remains outside the image. The painting inherits the Romantic charge of Delacroix's orphan, yet repositions it within a contemporary structure of repetition, incompletion, and return.
The looseness of the painted surface keeps the figure in a state of becoming, as if the image were still searching for the conditions of its own appearance. Within Les Orphelines, L'Orpheline is not only a reprise of loss; it is the persistence of historical emotion after its original world has disappeared.
