Original artwork description:

In a contemporary art world saturated with digital slickness and performative vulnerability, “Augusta Cry 4x4” by Jérôme Cholet slices through the noise like a whisper you can’t unhear. Here, model Augusta Alexander—one of fashion’s poster boys for sculptural perfection—is brought brutally down to earth. He’s not pouting for a perfume ad. He’s crying. And it’s real.

Composed of sixteen gridded photographic tiles, brushed with silver spray and sealed beneath a glossy coat of epoxy resin, the work offers more than just a fragmented portrait. It offers an emotional autopsy. His eyes—those unmistakable storm-grey eyes—weep. One tear streaks his right cheek, catching the light like a fissure in the performance of masculinity.

Cholet’s signature technique—slicing, sectioning, and reassembling the body like a map of concealed feelings—recalls the deconstructed portraiture of John Stezaker, but with the tender brutality of Wolfgang Tillmans or Collier Schorr. Where Tillmans searches for softness in the everyday and Schorr finds eroticism in androgyny, Cholet locates the sacred in breakdown. In “Augusta Cry 4x4”, the breakdown is both literal and visual.

The silver spray paint creates a ghostly patina over the image—a nod to relics, to memory, to artifice. The resin, meanwhile, hardens the moment into something shrine-like. This isn’t just a portrait. It’s a reliquary of vulnerability in a culture obsessed with control.

In today’s market, where collectors are starved for authenticity in the age of AI-generated emotion, “Augusta Cry 4x4” feels like both an artifact and an antidote. It’s raw, it’s polished, and yes—it’s crying. This is the kind of work that doesn’t hang quietly on a wall; it watches you back, tearfully, unapologetically human.

Whether shown in a white cube gallery or the corner of a collector’s private chapel to post-ironic beauty, Cholet’s work demands not only to be seen—but felt.

Materials used:

photo, spray paint

Tags:

#man #boy #art #smile #lgbt #warhol #andy warhol #lonleyness #richter rothko #gerhard richard #nan goldin #wolfgang tillmanns