Origin of the portrait

Max Haufler, before establishing himself as a film actor and director, he devoted himself to painting and was a pupil of the expressionist Paul Camenisch, together with he shared the poetic of the group Rot Blau. During the Twenties, he was part of that group of artists who lived in the small Alpine villages scattered between Ticino and Graubünden, with common friendship and passions. In this convivial environment, it often happened that an artist posed as someone else model: this was for example the case of Haufler, in this intense portrait realized in 1927 by Camenisch, a chromatic close-up that captivates the viewer’s eye for the liveliness and the contrast of colors.

An hypnotic artwork

The artist’s palette distorts the colors of nature through variations in red and blue and through the predominance of the sign, all distinctive elements related to Rot-Blau aesthetics. The result is an ambivalent feeling of extraordinary vivacity and hypnotic disorientation, fascinating peculiarities of the artist, able to penetrate the perception’s sphere of the viewer by immersing him in a metaphysical experience.