This publication represents the artworks from the Homme series of the French/Hungarian abstract painter, Judit Reigl.
After witnessing how the abstract form attained figurative signification, she converted the arbitrary blunder into a necessity and pictorial program. The human figure, emerging from the thick impasto of paint hurled on the canvas like an uninvited ghost or a shadow, has been haunting her painting ever since. Initally appearing on Lightning (1956), a painting of the gestural abstract Mass Writing series, the figure returned on the monumental canvases of Homme, which she painted between 1966 and 1972. Prior to her images of fragmented bodies-human figures who always appeared without heads or limbs- Reigl worked on Guano, a group of aborted and then recycled canvases that once covered her studio floor; the Experience of Weightlessness series, where the pigment, expanding toward the edge of the canvas, delineated the pictorial field as a frame; and the black and white calligraphic works of Mass Writing. In Experience and Mass Writing, the painted black signs, appearing as negative forms, marked out and activated the white ground. In Homme, the order and function of the colours changed; figure and ground, positive and negative replaced each other. The image of the body, written with black on white, red or purple grounds, preserved the spontaneity of the gesture despite its figurativity. Tensions between the deliberate and the accidental, the premeditated and the impulsive were not cancelled, but thematised, while dualities of figure and sign, representation and gesture were articulated not as differences, but as sameness. The Homme series, built on the figure and reserval of the chromatic order of her previous works, both disrupts and continues Reigl's former practice.