Original artwork.

With Hommage à Janet, the artist establishes a direct dialogue with the work of Janet Werner. Like Werner, Debby Talbot works from found images in fashion magazines as well as from various artistic references. She draws inspiration from Werner’s colourful and playful female figures, shaped by the aesthetics of Romanticism, Rococo, and early Modernism. That influence appears here in the elegant pose of the model, the expressive palette, and the way the figure feels at once alluring and vulnerable.

Formal alterations play a central role in the painting. Through distortions, concealments, cuts, and visual disruptions, the portrait resists becoming a stable or purely decorative image. A tension emerges between beauty and strangeness, presence and fragility. True to Debby Talbot’s artistic practice, the work explores fragmentation of identity, appearance, and the complexity of perception. Up close, the material dominates; from a distance, the figure reassembles and more fully reveals its mystery.