Hard men and femmes fatales

I feel a bit guilty every time I upload a painting by him (or a picture of a painting by him) on Vraie Fiction, but I can't afford to purchase Fabian Perez and he is maybe my favorite painter. My favorite living one anyway. This one is called The Proposal. There are other named like this one, showing the same scene, but this is my favorite among them. I have decided to blog about it because... Well, because. Because I blogged about an archetype yesterday, I guess, and I consider Perez' characters to be very much archetypical. I know it was not the intention, but I have the feeling he paints crime fiction. This is the first thing I thought about him when I discovered his work in a local art gallery, about two years ago. The art gallery has now moved to a nearby town, but they still exhibit the work of Fabian Perez, so I thought I would pay it a visit one day and actually take my own pictures of the paintings.

So why this painting in particular? The atmosphere displayed is more of a torrid summer night than a cool and wet springtime one like the ones we have now. But I had not published one on Vraie Fiction since June 2013. And the few times I showed his work, not once a woman was featured in the painting. And Perez is famous for his glamorous portraits of women. I was mentioning archetypes. Perez pretty much paints femmes fatales. This is not the most obvious one, but I love the subtlety of the painting. We do not know exactly what the woman is proposing, but we can imagine. This is a hard man, as Perez also paints manly men, full of testosterone and self-assured, but we can see he is not as strong as this whisper. There are the usual tropes of Perez: the (sinful) red wine, the cigaret's smoke, but at the center of the picture is the whisper. I am a philistine when it comes to art, but I can appreciate it all the same.