Cycladic Blues (2020), Skull (as a house) (2007)

Dumas’s painting Cycladic Blues (2020) portrays a close-up of the expressionless and stylized totemic head of inspired by an Early Cycladic figurine. Here three subtle movements of Dumas’s hands across her loosely liquid paint bring into existence the bare suggestion of eyes and a somber, downturned mouth where there were none before, placing this work somewhere on the spectrum oscillating between comedy and tragedy.

If the trace of Dumas’s human touch on the canvas can give a mournful voice to the mute, mask-like character of this ancient (possibly funerary) sculpture, it’s her unique take on the depiction of mortality that comes through even more clearly in the painterly, ossified architectonics of her work Skull (as a house) (2007).

Seen in full profile against a loosely uniform dark background, this “skull as a house” is one part Renaissance memento mori—a reminder that death comes to all—and another part haunted house (although not in the traditional sense of horror films). The haunting that is happening here is related to the inhabitation of the body as a house or structure for the persona that inhabits it. This place of shelter offers a barrier between inside and outside, a tremulous architecture of flesh and bone in which life and death are seen as a cycle rather than a straight line. Paradoxically perhaps, although these paintings are filled with death and melancholy, they are nonetheless lively and broadcast their resistance to the entropic movement of the body toward decay through a radiant embrace of life.