In the manner of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French, 1864–1901
The DJ, 2026
Colour lithograph
120 × 80 cm
Never painted.
Commissioned for the collection, 2026.
PAB 2026.14.2
Moving, 16-second loop ·
The DJ leans over his laptops, headphones on one ear, face turned green by the screens, and below him the crowd has raised a small forest of phones, the faces jammed against the bottom of the picture with their eyes shut. Lautrec cut his figures off at the edge of a poster the way a camera cuts them now. He would have drawn the phones. He would not have raised one.
The brief
A DJ in profile behind a booth of laptops, headphones half on, lit green from the screens, a mass of raised phone screens in the crowd below cropped at the bottom edge. Belle Époque colour lithograph poster, flat bold areas of red, black, mustard and cream, sinuous confident contour lines drawn in crayon, figures cropped sharply at the edges and seen from low tables, spattered tone, faces caricatured with tenderness and fatigue, large empty areas left as paper, gritty printed texture. Flat frontal reproduction of the poster on paper, the sheet fills the frame edge to edge, even lighting, no frame, no wall, no lettering, no text.
Written to the house rules. The painter's name does not appear.
Take it home
The painting on this room's wall, at its own proportions, nothing written on it.
