'If you want to learn how to paint, start by painting your own Picasso. '

— Tom Sachs

For this recent series of works, Tom Sachs immersed himself in paintings by Pablo Picasso, particularly those produced during his so-called ‘War Years’, between 1937 and 1945, which he reimagines using his own distinctive painterly language. This exhibition is conceived as a continuation of the show held at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais at the beginning of this year. For this second volume, however, Sachs has focused particularly on Picasso’s portraits: his reinterpretations of which form an interrogation of consumption and desire in portraiture, and a wry reflection on the purpose of painting itself.

Painting is a medium Sachs has returned to several times over the years, and the works on view were conceptualised in a period of focus on drawing and colour for the artist. In his New York studio, he surrounded himself with Picasso’s work, exploring the lines and forms used by the Spanish painter in works created starting in 1937 in which Sachs found parallels with his own practice. The thick lines that recur in Sachs’s work, originating from the influence of American graffiti and street art, mimic the solid black linework that delineates many of Picasso’s figures.

In the works on view, Sachs meticulously reproduces these thick lines and planes of bold colour true to scale, annotating them with their original title, date and dimensions, and signing them with both Picasso’s name and his own unmistakable cursive. While the self-referential finished pieces strike as academic, they also have an immediate, surface-level power: as The New Yorker writer Naomi Fry comments in a piece on Sachs’s new series, which is reproduced in the zine published to accompany the exhibition: ‘when I visited Sachs’s studio recently to look at his recently completed Picassos, they struck me with a startling force. With great immediacy, the originals were brought back to life, with an added Sachsian kick: Such gorgeous colors! Such gorgeous contours! Such gorgeous patterns! The portraits impressed me not as a mere intellectual exercise, but as something truly sensual.’

Sachs’s affinity with aspects of Picasso’s work is intriguingly disrupted by the critical eye Sachs has long cast at his approach to artmaking. Women were frequently included in Picasso’s paintings, often through the lens of their relationships with him and as symbols bearing the world’s pain, and there is something inescapably objectifying about his collecting of woman after woman on canvas. As Fry wrote: ‘These women—both models for and lovers of the so-called great man—served not just as figures for Picasso himself to observe and document, but, also, as lasting icons of midcentury femininity held up for the consumption of a yearning public. Then, of course, there is Sachs’s own revisiting of Picasso’s portraits, which I’d argue is, too, all about desire.’

Sachs’s longstanding interest in mass production, industrialisation, commercialism and the mechanisms of desire, and his exploration of and playful engagement with these themes in his own practice, provides a compelling counterpoint to Picasso’s approach. As Fry continued: ‘For Picasso, these painted femmes were muses, forever defined and confined by the artist and his work. In Sachs’s reimagined Picassos, however, it’s not the women whom he attempts to pin down—it’s Picasso himself.’