In the Western tradition of self-portraiture, painters embody something of the singularity of their relationship to the world – Dürer beauty, Rembrandt reality, Francis Bacon naked life, Andy Warhol surface – in a long series of self-stagings. Hassan Musa, an artist in the age of critical thought and deconstruction, opts for another way of confronting himself, a blend of intimacy and geopolitics. In his self-portraits, as in all his paintings, on wood, on printed fabrics, or canvas, in ink or oil, he lays bare the images and words of a vast maelstrom of cultural references, in a kind of intervisuality that he sifts through with his corrosive irony, in a telescoping of disparate elements held together by an offbeat humour. In literature, his assemblages could be considered zeugma, associating elements belonging to different semantic registers, or anacoluthon, in discontinuities and anachronisms, or in any case, ellipsis and the implicit. That’s it for the diagram, which renews the genre.

As the archangel Gabriel, dressed in a loose tunic, he is a messenger, pointing with a hand gesture that serves as proof to a large, empty, white drape, his impassive and insistent gaze taking us to witness a presence/absence and an undeterminable place (“here?”) while – cut out of a Tiepolo-esque sky, dressed in long, white, frothy robes – four miniature angels animate the space. With this Autoportrait aux Anges (1987), Musa borrows from traditional representations of angels in European painting, while connecting the three panels of the triptych of a Hadith, in Arabic calligraphy, attesting to the anteriority of the encounter between Gabriel and the Prophet: “I was a Prophet while Adam was (still) between water and clay.” Undoubtedly, angels belong to everyone. In Ange (2002), naked and athletic, with robust wings and a halo sketched in white paint on a background of Provençal fabric, Musa holds an axe, ready – like the archangel Michael confronting the dragon of the Apocalypse with his lance – to do battle with the miseries and scandals of the whole world, against a backdrop of a profusion of flowers that partially cover the image and curiously flatten it. And we should remember that Musa has long expressed his anger at the current and past abjections of the world; «a dangerous place run by criminals.» In his Autoportrait Avec Idées Noires (2003), taking the words of the title literally, he surrounds himself – this time without wings – with two female figures, each encapsulating, in a different way, the racist violence of a colonialism that invented and consumed African exoticism. One is that of Josephine Baker, the other that of Saartje, alias Sarah Baartman, a young girl from a South African ethnic group, absurdly described as the «Hottentot Venus», who ignominiously became the object of «science» and fairground, here in the absolute nudity of a cast of her body. But it is in a self-portrait multiplied into three angels, one of which has the body of Batman, a reversal, give or take a few letters, of the name given to her by her predators, that he surrounds the sanctified Saartje, in the background of a fabric saturated with small drawings of 19th-century objects, evoking the artifacts of ethnographic museums long unconcerned with ethics, to the point of enriching their collections with looted places of worship and reified bodies (Worship Objects , 2003).

There are many other subjects of indignation. Repurposing Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Musa created his Autoportrait en pirate somalien au large de Kanagawa (2015), against a backdrop of fabrics printed with fighter planes and sailing ships. But here the fragile fishing boats threatened by the raging waves in the Japanese woodblock print are occupied by Somali pirates, like those who, in the 2000s, undertook to fight against illegal fishing practiced on their coasts by boats from Southeast Asia, Iran or Europe, plundering schools of fish and destroying an essential and fragile source of income.

Elsewhere, here we are with him stuffed with sweet and colorful pastries, augmented by the portrait of the erotic and no less industrial icon that was Marilyn Monroe (Autoportrait avec la vierge Marilyn , 2020), the latter being additionally placed at the foundations of the history of painting and the art market as evoked in short by the triptych The Food Chain I (triptic) , in 2021. In this work, from left to right, back-to-back and three-quarter view, come Saint Luke – with the features of Michelangelo – with brush and palette, inventing without a model not the portrait of the Virgin Mary as in Vasari’s fresco, but that of a sensual Marilyn whom the painter’s hand-rest cane now seems to threaten, then René Magritte, in a quote from his self-portrait La Clairvoyance (1936), and finally Musa who – while mimicking Magritte’s gesture painting on Saint Luke’s back – watches us watch him, and like him not fooled by the potential betrayal of images. One more detail: on the far left of the painting, at the origin of the origin, out of frame, a hand with an outstretched index finger indicates the direction of the gaze and, in the same gesture, holds the painted panels, creating an image within the image. The whole is punctuated by superimposed motifs – images within the image within the image, multiplying the planes with an effect of depth that is the hallmark of Musa’s works – toucan, tiger, cheetah, and tropical fish; all endangered animals accompanied by luminous, flowery medallions of a Virgin in glory in her mandorla/vulva. Very close to Musa’s face is a butterfly of the genus Yponomeuta , fragile but capable of using its wings like a drum to ward off predators.

Sometimes, this great series of borrowings and diversions that feed the images to invent themselves, generate curious associations as with Crush (Frida) , in 2022. In a striking shortcut, the accident that broke the body of the Mexican artist, whom the great American pop art market has made an icon of its own history, is here evoked by collages of onomatopoeia from comics (“Crush!”, “Blaf!”, “Ha Ha Ha ”...). We think of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963), an ironic adaptation of a Men of War page, an anthology of war images in comics, and by association of ideas to the history of conflictual relations between the United States and Mexico, in a long series of annexations and border wars. But here, Musa’s self-portrait sits alongside the inverted, luminous one of an irresistible Frida Kahlo, provoking another kind of crush, this time colored with fascination, attraction and desire. Although his artistic approach is a great device of protest, Musa also makes it a space for play; his titles – most often painted on the works themselves and forming part of the composition – bear witness to this, and it is in the form of a “joke” (Autoportrait en impressionnant , 2022) that he expresses his admiration for the impressionist painters who have accompanied him a lot in his work in recent years. Nonsense, for which the high potential for elucidating complexity is otherwise well-known, is invoked in The Queen & I (2021), for an improbable dialogue between Musa (I) and Queen Elizabeth (Q), with tiny twirling effigies of a turbaned Superman, a portrait of Che Guevara, chili peppers, tomatoes, and figs – some open and pink – superimposed on the two portraits, as is a jubilant text in Gothic letters painted in red:

Q: Hassan, now that Philip has passed away, I think we can get married. I: Elizabeth, you know that I cannot marry you. I am already married to Patricia. Q: Hassan, you are Muslim, you can marry four wives! I: Elisabeth, try to understand my position, I am a moderate Muslim! Q: Well, nobody’s perfect

The fact that there is so little narcissism on Hassan Musa’s self-portraits says a lot about him: an artist born in Sudan, trained in art in Khartoum, holding a doctorate in art history in France, where he lives. He is a drawer, painter, calligrapher, engraver, illustrator, performer, seamster, «tinkerer» and «image maker,» a lover of fabrics and colors, an art critic, a great reader and a keen observer, a transformer of an inexhaustible cultural repertoire without borders. For his Autoportrait aux idées de couleurs (2003), he appears naked on a patchwork of fabrics printed with flowers, strawberries, grapes, and birds, idyllic evocations contradicted, in the background, by the disturbing drips of a gigantic explosion. Everything goes together: heaven and hell, the life drive and the death drive, tolerance and violence. What is to be done? Against all that confuses us, traps us, and threatens us, Musa’s self-portraits suggest possible common spaces of resistance.

Evelyne Toussaint Contemporary Art Historian Professor Emeritus at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès