The Brooklyn Rail

What do you see in a face? Eyes, nose, mouth, framing hair, attitude to life? You saw all this and more if you happened to drop by the inaugural exhibition at Nagas, a small bright gallery on the second floor of a townhouse at the edge of the flower and garment district. You opened the door to a front room and found yourself surrounded by faces drawn with a fine point pen in several colors of ink on several different kinds and colors of paper. Six of the drawings were of single faces, all women except for a single androgynous male, with one drawing of five figures—gender indeterminate—who may or may not be a single orgiastic group. All eleven faces are too self contained to look at anyone else, but a few suggest they may be aware of someone, the artist perhaps. Odd: Leonor Fini is better known in the US as a surrealist painter and muse to surrealists and nonsurrealists alike than as the exquisite draftswoman these drawings prove her to be.

Each of the single faces can be covered by the palm of your hand, and if the five faces in the group drawing were brought together, you could cover them as easily with the same hand. You have to look closely, and the closer you look the more you see: heads tilted or thrown back, fire ready to burst from eyes. For a long moment, before you remember that Fini was born in 1907 and died in ’96, it’s the Renaissance here and now, with drawing as target practice and the only scores recorded bull’s eyes, but when you pause at the last face, having circled the room left to right, and the gallerist suggests that the face with teeming hair might be a play on Caravaggio, and shows you Caravaggio’s Medusa on his phone, you agree and are grateful. You were thinking of the British Museum’s drawings by Michelangelo, at the Morgan, possibly because of the Pompeii red paper used for the first face when you entered the room, and of Parmigianino’s drawings in ink faded to brown by the time they accompanied his paintings to the Frick.

Some faces are ecstatic, which leaves you out of what’s going on apart from what you see, but you don’t mind since the details available are miraculous. There’s nothing extraordinary about cross hatching in art, though you’re more likely to associate it with etching than drawing, and it usually fills a predetermined space, as shadow for instance in Morandi’s etchings of the sun struck white walls near Bologna. But in one of the drawings at Nagas, the third counting from the left after you walked through the open doorway, the cross hatching assumes a different role, generating instead of filling in not only the shaded half of a face but also a completely convincing and sexy open eye and pair of lips. Because you’ve never seen cross hatching used this way, you feel as if Western representational art has suddenly gone left or right instead of straight ahead, as in timelines and surveys.

The drawings shown at Nagas, including the one with five faces, are quite different from Fini’s no less carefully painted oils of feathered witches in fancy dress, their fated doubles, and baleful staring cats, as well her superb portrait gouaches, in which faces are blurred as if by tears or rain streaked window panes. None of the drawings seem to be, as for many artists they usually are, studies for works in different media and sizes. Such drawings probably do exist for the stage and ballet settings Fini designed for Balanchine and Genet, among others, and for the pastels and ink drawings done for editions of books she liked enough to illustrate, such as Les fleurs du mal and Histoire d’O, but the drawings at Nagas, one a gift to an associate and friend, are so obviously lacking in any kind of calculation that doesn’t contribute to their execution and therefore what you see, that they made the room in which they were shown, pleasant as it is, disappear into more immediate concerns. You found yourself asking what is that woman (or, once, that possible man) thinking of, and even if you thought you knew the answer, you meant the woman (or man) whose face you were looking at, not Leonor Fini, who might as well have been alive in Paris or at her ruined monastery in Corsica. The drawings were a tonic reminder that life could be different and in fact already is.