Alfa (2004)
Persona (2020)

Death haunts painting in general and Dumas’s works in particular, and it is the human face that stands at the formal forefront of this nagging, stalking, and persistent movement of bodily time toward its inevitable endpoint. Faces of all kinds populate Dumas’s canvases. In Alfa (2004), the artist’s gauzy, atmospheric handling of her oil paints gives an emptied out, mask-like character to the face of a dead woman seen in profile and lying in final repose. The source material for this painting was a newspaper clipping of a young dead Chechnyan woman who was part of the Moscow theater hostage tragedy in 2002 while its title is derived from the first letter of the Greek alphabet.

In the bible, Jesus refers to himself as the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. The much later work, Persona (2020), is a pathos-filled portrait of a face taken from a photograph of one of Auguste Rodin’s plaster casts created for his monumental Gates of Hell (1880-1917). As Dumas has pointed out, the word persona derives from the Latin word for mask and was used to describe the devices donned by actors in ancient theater in order to embody their characters. The face as mask becomes the façade through which an actor performs either on stage or in life. At the end of that life, in the eyes of those who are gazing upon it, the face becomes a death mask, or rather, a stand-in for the presence that once inhabited a body.