Henri Beaufour’s artistic work has focused primarily on the study of the human face—of the portrait—in the classical sense of the expression of individuality, characteristics, and the differences between individuals. For this French artist, though, it is not merely a matter of focusing on descriptions of realistic persons; instead, he works on creating something situated halfway between imagination and effective reality. In his capacity as a sculptor, painter, or engraver, Beaufour never adheres entirely to reality; rather, he creates intuitively in the moment and, above all, according to his profound erudition in the humanities and literature. While his work can be defined as a ‘journey to the end of matter’, it is also true that his explorations of human psychology often reveal literary resonances, in which the characters belong to a story suspended between the truth of reason and the immensity of fantasy.

Henri Beaufour’s output is original, certainly—timeless, almost, and far removed from fads and nostalgia: a body of work of great depth, but one that is also often imbued with irony. Physical deformities may call to mind the sculptures of 18th-century German-Austrian artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, but equally, they combine dramatic and expressive intensity with an occasional vein of sarcasm. Even though his works feature classic animals of sculpture, such as dogs, horses, or more unusual animals such as pigs, the subject of Beaufour’s art has almost always been the representation of men or women.

His ‘Imaginary Portraits’ possess the analytical force of a ‘Human Comedy’ and the irony and magic of Marcel Schwob’s ‘Imaginary Lives’, such that, if we were to gather all his portraits together, we would probably end up with quite an extraordinary novel. But art lives through episodes, and so, in the artistry of Beaufour’s poetics, all his chance encounters and his personal or literary memoirs become a unique portrait gallery, in which everything is an integral part of the artist’s world and vision. His sources of inspiration are manifold: In his ‘story’, quarry workers, male or female, live side by side with creatures born of mythology, like centaurs, or of literature, like Sancho Panza.

Henri Beaufour’s technique lends the material a dramatic quality, disturbing the forms in a relentless metamorphosis. In an attempt to give meaning not just to the creative energy poured into the representation, but also to the continuous movement of lines and colours, his work could be defined as ‘baroque expressionism’. His productions appear to be suspended in a state of continuous transmutation: In certain paintings, we sense a form in uninterrupted tension, but one that seems capable of changing at any moment; there is an inner motion that strikes the observer standing before the work. The forms seem to be in temporary stasis; even the hard marble seems to have been passed over by an impetuous hand in search of a boundary between the formal and the informal. Nevertheless, Beaufour remains a figurative artist who has devoted his attention to the human figure: to the faces of characters from myth and literature who rub shoulders with him in his everyday encounters. He is an extraordinary observer of reality, but he contemplates it with the spirituality of a quest that is both absolute and personal. Picasso, too, produced a memorable set of ‘Imaginary Portraits’ in Mougins in 1969, in which, with his own distinctive style, he brought together various elements from his artistic output—from Mediterranean myths to the ironies of real people he had met. The Venice exhibition features works from the 1990s to the present day, with marble and bronze sculptures, drawings, and acrylics tracing a personal path of research that ranks among the most original in contemporary art. On the ground floor of the Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina, some large-scale sculptures will point the way, while a series of murals will offer up a panorama of the complexity of Henri Beaufour’s productions; some forty works in all, to introduce to the general public the magnitude of the artist’s work and the experiments he has conducted across all the languages of art to define his own vision of the world.