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Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Ancestral Head, 1965 oil on canvas signed, titled & dated with archive no.156 verso h:65  w:54 in. Literature: Illustrated on Page 100 of 'Louis Le Brocquy' by Dorothy Walker Published by Ward River Press Dublin 1981 Reprinted from "The Recorder, Volume 42, The American Irish Historical Society, 1981", as stated by Louis leBrocquy: 'Art is neither an instrument nor a convenience, but a secret logic of the imagination. It is another way of seeing, the whole sense and value of which lies in its autonomy, its distance from actuality, its otherness. I believe that true art is a form of intelligence, nine tenths of which, like the iceberg, lie below the surface.' As stated by Jacques Dupin and translated from the French by John Ashbery in the book 'Louis le Brocquy' by Dorothy Walker, 'A human head, an indistinct but familar-looking face cautiously wears a hole in the canvas - and advances towards us. Its features are blurred, almost effaced, but the intensity if its presence keeps us riveted to its motion. It does not seem as though a painter had shaped this head; at most, he heped it to be born, forced it to disengage itself from the white shadow in which it lay buried. It is not confined by a contour, nor by the successive contributions of brush-stroke and line. Rather the form, organically erected like a slow coagulation of space, seems to rise implicity out of the suppression of everything that might be foreign to it. What it offers is not the appearance of a face but its inner construction, the facets and tensions of a being in the act of becoming. Visionary mist, complex of memory and legend, this white expanse which covers the canvas is itself the core or matrix that engenders the human head. No one could have invented it; one could only await and desire its coming or its return. Waiting is exacting work, the incessant work to which this painter had to submit himself during long years in order to draw, out of the depths, the flowing of a head (or a torso), the reality of its presence, its ascent to the light of day. A vigil, both sensitive and obstinate, is kept over the emergence of this head, still indefinite because it has not tightened about itself the knot of identity, because a conflict of blues and carmines holds it in suspension, overhanging like a figurehead or some outcrop of rock in snow. Bound as it is by innumerable and invisible ties to the massive confusion of its roots, it pushes forward as though spurning the refuge of a name and the immobility of a mask. Stripped of the accidental, it is not caught up in mere appearance. No screen halts it, no weight of shadow holds it back, no conceivable thought deters it in its resolve. The more distant its origin, the longer will be its way. All possibilities converge on this head, a sheaf of contradictions assuring its cohesion, its freedom to approach us.