Carlo with Dubuffet in the background

Larry Rivers depicts Carlo Bilotti in a rigid frontal pose, taken from a painting by the French abstract artist Dubuffet, which is also owned by the collector. Bilotti is portrayed in a corner of his house, dressed informally in a shirt with vertical lines, which contrast with the horizontal lines in the background of the work, a subtlety that creates a mild ironic effect. As in Rivers’ style, the painting is left unfinished, in this case parts of the legs are only sketched in, to make the seriousness normally found in portraiture less dramatic. The canvas has been recut along the figure’s profile and stretched over a rigid support, to look like one those real sized advertising figures, placed outside shops that for a fraction of a second give the illusion of being real.