hellequinharlequinclown

The word harlequin can be traced back to Alichino, the devil in Dante's Inferno and later hellequin, the medieval French word for 'demon.' The harlequin we associate with representations of the court jester, "trickster," and comedic servant within Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture can be attributed to Tristan Martinelli's early enactment and appropriation of the zanni, a debased Venetian caricature of the rural peasant class who later became a stock character in French passion plays. Though it is unclear whether the zanni wore patchwork or rhombus and triangle-patterned garb, it should be noted that similar textiles are also associated with nomadic workers, vagabonds, and wanderers from other cultures who also existed in class-based marginality and precarity.

Many of the paintings in hellequinharlequinclown are limited by their own mode of construction: if built any larger, the already-warped frames would need cross-supports in order to function at all. These skeletal structures--built by cutting sections of old stretcher bars and fastening them the way one might sew together pieces of old fabric--are stretched with a transparent raw linen resembling a death shroud. Although the painterly logic of the image must reckon and wrestle with this irregular, almost abject physical form, the harlequin pattern-as-surface is also deployed as a conceptual framework for Carter's entire body of work. Evidence of this is the artist's assertion that “pattern, as well as the defunctness of the thin profile bars, is embedded within the DNA of each painting."