About the work
He is looking at something we cannot see. He has been looking at it for a long time.
 
Ascension is the most formally ambitious work in the SD PARIS Portraits series a male face rendered in extreme counter-plongée, the viewpoint from below, the gaze directed upward with an intensity that sits on the exact threshold between physical effort and spiritual aspiration. The entire composition radiates from the centre of the face outward thousands of parallel marks converging on the bridge of the nose, the eyes, the mouth, building form through density rather than outline, constructing a face the way a star constructs itself: through pressure, through accumulation, through the weight of everything pressing inward.
 
The blue is absolute. Di Nicolantonio uses the full tonal range of ballpoint ink here from the near-black of the deepest shadows at the eye sockets and nostrils to the palest traces at the edges of the composition where the marks thin and the white of the paper reasserts itself like light at the periphery of a very intense experience.
 
This is not a drawing made in blue. It is a drawing that is blue the colour and the mark are the same thing, the medium and the meaning indistinguishable.
 
Ascension does not describe transcendence. It enacts it through the pressure of ten thousand marks, the accumulated weight of a line that would not stop until the face was fully, irrevocably, present.
 
An original drawing from the Portraits series by Sébastien Di Nicolantonio.
Edition Unique original — one of a kind
Signature Hand-signed by the artist
Authentication Sold with certificate of authenticity and gallery invoice
Technique Original drawing — ballpoint pen on paper
Dimensions 29.7 × 42 cm — A3 format
Framing Unframed — framing available upon request