Leonor Fini: Small Faces

A face is a signature. A measurement of singularity, humanity. No matter where any of us come from, our face is our own: a genetic imprint and sieve of our experiences. 

 

Portraiture as an art form, traps the face in time. Gathers an ephemeral self—a glance, its body at rest or in motion and offers it permanence. Beyond a likeness, it’s an echo. The articulation of the wish to remember a presence and the failure to truly know. An artifact of absence, a portrait is evidence of the impossibility of satisfying its own desire. 

 

What might it mean to make a portrait that reflects the point of view of someone in thrall with the force of another? To render their gaze, their way of seeing, through a stroke of a few lines, suggestions. To be faithful to feeling over accuracy, to throw away the template, the history of the art form that prioritizes representation over abstraction—to try to be true. 

 

In their defining work of criticism, Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant writes that “when we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.” In portraiture, if truthfulness is the goal and not verisimilitude, what might be desired is desire itself. The desire for the subject. The desire for the self. The desire for the act of making art. The desire for freedom from any idea of ownership of a person, object, or idea.

 

Portraiture as an art form, could then be a reaching point for capturing the interiority as well as exteriority of a person.

 

Leonor Fini was one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Trieste, she moved to Paris at the age of eighteen to become an artist. A participant in almost every major artistic movement of her time, she was a painter, a performer, a costume designer, an illustrator, and a writer. Admired by artists ranging from Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst to Alberto Moravia and Jean Cocteau, Fini was a nonconformist even by today’s standards, living in a house full of cats, rejecting monogamy, and a host of infamous salons. While often associated with the Surrealists, she refused to be tied to one artistic genre, style, or movement. The range of her artistic output is still unaccounted for, as many of her works are currently held in private collections. However, it’s estimated that the breadth of her work exceeds that of those of her contemporaries—and in recent years, her work has drawn an increase in critical and commercial curiosity. The gallery Nagas’ inaugural exhibition, Leonor Fini: Small faces, is an addition and counterpoint to this recent attention on her artistry.

 

Fini’s work was defined by radiant use of a number of frequent themes: women and nonbinary figures as sorceresses, sphinxes, skeletons, and witches—often in moments of action. As Ilian Rebei writes in the press release for the exhibition, “Faces in her art were rarely fixed or stable; instead, they often appeared in transformation, layered with multiple expressions, or dissolving into spectral forms.” By focusing on seven small portraits by Fini, all of ink on paper, this exhibition unveils a new perspective on this dynamic artist—one who spent her whole life making art from a spirit of desire.

 

Why look at these drawings of small faces, when Fini’s paintings are so operatic in scope? Perhaps there’s something in the drama of a single line. Something about spaces in between that make us breathless, holds us in a suspension of time. Each of the drawings in this exhibition are in the midst of a transformation. Each captures a gaze exchanged between artist and subject, recorded in such a way for us to see now, in public, the preservation of intimacy in a private look. The character of each subject is visible through the flick of a line, the curve of a neck, a pout made by a line and the shading of a mouth.

 

“Focusing on only the essential touches of a figure, suggesting fullness by depicting it as if seen at a glance. Isn’t that how we gaze upon those we pass by on the street, even those we love?”

 

Historically, capturing the likenesses of individuals in paint denoted power and status, functioned as an identifier of those deemed worthy of depiction: kings, queens, saints, and gods in disguise. The sitter was often chosen by wealth, the artist’s task to translate their patron’s status into symbol, flesh into beauty. Painting itself served as a negotiation between self and surface, between time and representation. Technique was the measure of an artist’s talent, their personal tastes often rendered silent, invisible, unless granted freedom to experiment by their patrons. Style, what was in fashion, evolved in relation with the taste of the higher classes, the artists followed its evolutions in search of work. Drawings and sketches were more often than not, the expression of an artist’s mode of thinking. A portrait was rarely evidence of the total voice of an artist—instead, it was an act of worship, propaganda, a rendering of beauty elevated through the use of paint. This is, in many ways, still true—artists need to eat. However, once photography was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, capturing the likeness of someone became simple, mechanical. It’s becoming increasingly less expensive to take a photograph and now, in 2025, most people with a mobile phone can capture every second of their day. A portrait no longer serves the same function. No longer bound to fidelity, artists increasingly turn inward or elsewhere, for inspiration to render bodies on a canvas. They paint friends, partners, family, passersby—in search of the unspoken, the hidden, the fragment. The portrait, once a monument, became as loud as a whisper. While patrons of affluent means continue to commission artists on occasion, rarely do we see works in the public eye that depict the face in its beauty, oddity, in its frustrations—in its capacity as a muscle.

 

What is the divine, the face of it—extrapolated from any notion of status? Perhaps the rendering of it might lie in defying the limits of artistic convention. Focusing on only the essential touches of a figure, suggesting fullness by depicting it as if seen at a glance. Isn’t that how we gaze upon those we pass by on the street, even those we love? Rarely do we sit in front of another, study them in detail. We see the features that hold our attention in that moment, relegate the rest to momentary obscurity before we shift focus to another feature. By that point, a glance extends past a second.

 

In Fini’s portraits of these unnamed subjects, the view of someone for just one moment—the tilt of a head, the dip of an eyebrow, a glance over a shoulder—reveals the face in such a way that a viewer is in the active position of transforming a visual image into a living impression. In her hands, portraiture evolves from a monument for identity into a celebration of transformation. Fini sees faces as they are for a singular moment, trapped in time. In the midst of movement, as faces always are. As we always are, in motion.

 

In The Emancipated Spectator, the French theorist Jacques Racière suggests that emancipation emerges once a subject becomes aware that to look and be looked at are not actions that sit on either end of a binary spectrum of action. The awareness that everyone is always participating and viewing, being an object and a subject, constantly in motion, propels Fini too. Seeing and doing must, in and of themselves, not be acted upon by a desire to dominate but to see. In order to truly see, one must also desire to be seen as more than just a fixed self.

 

Fini’s drawings offer us the chance to witness her gaze. How she melds cheeks and fingers into the same line. Connects fragments of skin as if no bumps are present, to make exquisite not the firmness or sag of skin, but the softness of how it feels to touch. Zooms in, zooms out, she twists a head this way and that, intersecting androgyny with the delicacy of a Renaissance painting. Her drawings, part-corpse and entirely marvelous, emancipate portraiture from the notion of a fixed reality, from its replication.

 

Nothing distinctly specific is present except the force of a soul.

 

A face looks back at us, asking to be remembered as it slips away.

 

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On the author: Micaela Brinsley is a Tokyo-born writer, editor, and independent researcher of art and performance. Recent work can be found in Tenement Press, Strings Magazine, Antiphony Journal, Asymptote, Discount Guillotine, Horizon Magazine, and Minor Literature[s]. She writes ekphrastic essays about women artists of the surrealist and abstract modes including Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Leonor Fini, and Maruja Mallo, for A Women's Thing. She is also the co-editor-in-chief of the arts and literary magazine, La Piccioletta Barca.