As was the case with the sculpture Rui Sanches made in the 1980s, his drawings of that period were concerned with the deconstruction of neoclassical painting. This is the case in point here. The pictorial reference is made clearly and obviously legible in the artist’s quotation of the canvas Marat’s Death (also known as To Marat because of the artist’s inscription) by the French neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David.

Taking this as his point of departure, and thus inserting himself into tradition, the drawing is then worked as a surface which resists our gaze, giving us an image that is, while appropriated, also personal. As is so frequently the case in this artist’s drawings, the intervention of line (and of marks) establish the dimension of the compositional planes. Right at the end of this decade, To Marat still allows us to glimpse its referent, before Sanches was to remove it altogether from his work and return to a more direct organic idiom.

EF