Far from wanting to mortify figurative painting, the artist reaches iconoclasm to awaken the subjects from their torpor. The removal of the skin, which leaves a trace of itself on the copper plate, makes the face of the figure inscrutable in order to redirect us to the only other gaze, the petrified one found at the top of the fingers. The impossibility of being able to read the entirety of this painting plunges us into a pain, as acute as it is atrocious, that corrodes tradition.