John Elderfield: Reverón’s last works are self-portraits, and most important among these are a sequence with his doll models behind him.
We know that these were painted with him looking in a mirror, and we’re asked to assume that the whole surface of the drawing is actually a replication of the mirrored surface. In mirrors, the images are actually smaller than we think they are, because the image is actually as far behind the surface as you are in front of the surface. And this is disregarded. So there’s that strangeness about it.
But the thing that happens with mirrors is that they tend to put everything on the same plane. Evidently the dolls are behind him. But he has drawn them…as if everything is flat together on one surface. To the left of his head, we see these dark hatch forms meandering down this surface. Do they belong to him? Do they belong to the doll? Or do they belong to some space between them? On the right-hand side, we have this blue whitish arc turning up from his collar. Is that a part of the doll? And… we lose our bearings because of this uncertainty of what belongs to what.
In the last decade of his life, Reverón was beginning to suffer more from schizophrenia, the illness which had begun to dog him in the late 1920s. Schizophrenics have a very uncertain sense of what their physical boundaries are. And I find in these drawings a very strange sense of a body with uncertain boundaries, and moving. It’s as if he’s moving into space, and also he’s moving into the same space as the dolls. We know cognitively that the dolls are inanimate, and he’s a live person. But in fact perceptually looking at these, one wouldn’t know.