an excerpt from:
Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Work from the Final Period
by Antonin Artaud

The human face is an empty force, a field of death.

The old revolutionary demand for a form which has never corresponded to its body, which left to be something other than the body.

So it's absurd to reproach a painter for being academic who now still persists in reproducing the features of the human face as they are; for as they are they still have not found the form that they indicate and specify; and do more than sketch, but from morning to night, and in the midst of ten thousand dreams, pound as in the crucible of a never-tiring impassioned palpitation.

Which means that the human face has not yet found its face.

and that it's up to the painter to give it one. But this means that the human face as it is is still searching with two eyes, a nose, a mouth and two auricular cavities which correspond to the holes of orbits like the four openings of the burial vault of approaching death.

The human face bears in fact a kind of perpetual death on its face

from which it's up to the painter precisely to save it

in giving its own features back to it.

For the thousands and thousands of years in fact that the human face has been speaking and breathing

one somehow still has the impression that it has not yet started to say what it is and what it knows.

And I don't know of any painter in the history of art from Holbein to Ingres, who, this face of man, succeeded in making it speak. The portraits by Holbein or Ingres are thick walls which explain nothing about the ancient mortal architecture which buttresses itself under the arcs of the eyelids' vault, or embeds itself in the cylindrical tunnel of the two mural cavities of the ears.

Only van Gogh was able to draw out of a human head a portrait which was the explosive rocket of the beating of a buried heart.

His own.

Van Gogh's head in a soft felt hat renders null and void all the attempts of abstract paintings which can be made after him, until the end of eternities.

For this face of an avid butcher, projected like cannon-shot onto the most extreme surface of the canvas,

and which all of a sudden sees itself stopped

by an empty eye

and returned toward the inside,

completely exhausts the most specious secrets in which abstract or non-figurative painting can delight,

which is why, in the portraits I have drawn,
I have above all avoided forgetting the nose, the mouth, the eyes, the ears or the hair, but I've tried to make this face that was speaking to me tell

the secret

of an old human story which passed as if dead in the heads of Ingres or Holbein.

Sometimes, next to human heads, I've made objects, trees or animals appear because I'm still not sure of the limits at which the body of the human self can stop.

Moreover I've definitely broken with art, style or talent in all the drawings that you will see here. I want to say that there will be hell to pay for whoever considers them works of art, works of aesthetic stimulation of reality.

Not one is properly speaking a work.

All are sketches, I mean soundings or staggering blows in all directions of chance, possibility, luck, or destiny.

I have not sought to refine my lines or my results,

but to express certain kinds of patent linear truths which have as much value thanks to words, written phrases, as graphic style and the perspective of features.

It is thus that several drawings are mixtures of poems and portraits, of written interjections and plastic evocations of elements, of materials, of personages, of men or animals.

It is in that way that one must accept these drawings in the barbarism and the disorder of their graphic style "which is never preoccupied with art" but with the sincerety and spontaneity of the line.