My recent works for Drawing Now Paris 2020 are inspired by Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Created exactly two hundred years ago, this masterpiece remains powerful in its subjective, political, and symbolic dimensions.

Rather than reproducing the original painting, my intention was to translate it into a drawing process. I focus on specific moments and fragments, isolating details and reassembling them into new compositions. Through this method, I explore themes such as disaster, brutality, survival, tragedy, hope, and death.

My work is rooted in the true historical event behind Géricault’s painting and recontextualizes it within the present day—particularly in relation to the countless boats attempting to reach Europe’s coasts from Africa. Today, The Raft of the Medusa can be read as a disturbing reminder of capsized vessels in the Mediterranean Sea and the grim reality of the ongoing refugee crisis.

Each element of the original painting—the bodies, the sea, the sky, the raft, the sail—carries an intense emotional and symbolic charge. My central question was how these elements communicate when removed from their original positions. How can this immense intensity be condensed and translated into the small format of a drawing?

I first encountered Géricault’s painting ten years ago, and it remains one of the most impactful images in the history of art for me. The work addresses the extreme consequences of human desperation, including cannibalism—an event that deeply shocked French society during the Enlightenment and represented a fundamental rupture of civilization.

Technique
Graphite and Color pencil drawings on Velin d‘Arches and BFK Rives paper.

About the story
The painting depicts a moment of hope in the tragic saga of the Medusa, a French Royal naval ship that broke apart off the coast of West Africa in 1816 while on a mission to retake Senegal from the British after the Napoleonic Wars. After hitting a sandbar, the French captain filled the limited lifeboats with officers, politicians, and others deemed worthy of rescue and then ordered a raft to be constructed for the 147 remaining men (and one woman)—including many Algerian immigrants—from the wood scraps of the sinking vessel. Lifeboats briefly towed the raft until, in an infamous act of cowardice and cruelty, the captain cut it loose to hasten the rescue of the men on the boats. When the raft was found 13 days later, only 15 of the 147 had survived.

Facts
The Raft of the Medusa was not only one of the first paintings created without a commission but was also one of the first paintings of the Romantic Movement. The shipwreck was contemporary, and it is the first time you see a French artist being critical of the regime. If you read first the story of Medusa, you expect to see malnourished and skinny bodies fighting for life. He painted idealized, muscular bodies, which are a strong contradiction to how men truly looked. The sky and the water are also definitely Romantic as they depict drama, shadow, and light.
The radical composition and one polarizing element is one dark-skinned figure -“mules” being on atop of a Piramide. But Gericault, as the Raft depicts, did place his hopes in a man of color, a black man, a “pariah”. Given the fact that most whites in Louis XVIII’s day considered black less than human–their place.
That was very provocative and invited derision.
As one critic, Kenneth Clark states, The Raft of the Medusa “remains the chief example of Romantic pathos expressed through the nude; and that obsession with death, which drove Géricault to frequent mortuary chambers and places of public execution, gives truth to his figures of the dead and dying. Their outlines may be taken from the classics, but they have been seen again with a craving for violent experience.

Exhibition view Gallery Heike Curtze, 2020, Vienna, Austria