Les Trois Chaplin is an original work in gold leaf on paper, 18 × 24 × 1.5 inches.
Three faces occupy the composition side by side, each one recognizably the same and none of them quite identical. The gold that builds them is broad and worked, catching texture across the cheeks and brow, while the black ground carves the features from within — eyes, nose, the dark gap of a mouth — so the face is simultaneously present and absent, formed by what the gold withholds as much as what it gives.
Above and below the figures, Auruscript runs in dense horizontal registers, script packed tight enough to read as texture before it reads as language. The faces emerge from this field of marks the way a subject emerges from its own documentation: surrounded, annotated, not quite captured. Three Chaplins because one was never enough — the performer, the myth, the thing the myth became. The gold refuses to sentimentalize any of them.
One-of-a-kind original. Gold leaf on paper. 18 × 24 × 1.5 inches.
A work about the distance between a face and what gets written around it.
