His face is thrust forward so that his shoulders seem puny and far away – like Alice, in Wonderland, when her serpent neck had borne her head away from her body. In Roeg’s magnified head, the eyes command the picture. They insist on your attention, for they tell two stories. His right eye is bright with a visionary gleam, an eager translucence that seems to emit light as well as reflect it; the left eye, by contrast, is dulled, occluded and full of woe – a disappointed eye that seems to droop under its disfiguring eyebrow, as Roeg’s father’s face was disfigured by war, as characters in his films suddenly reveal ghastly facial blemishes or transfigurations (the dwarf murderer in Don’t Look Now, features-less alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth). Furrows of melancholy cut a deep T-shape in Roeg’s brow, like a crucifix without a head: and a multiplicity of Gethsemane emotions – suffering, resignation, detachment – contribute to the picture’s mood. Signs of ageing, in the pouched cheeks and wispy hair, are countered by the immediacy - the stroppy thereness – of the director’s gaze, the unsmiling set of the mouth. Though not an old face, it’s a decadent one. It has seen more than is good for a human.

Suddenly you take in the asteroid shower of tiny blemishes that pock the portrait’s surface – sand? pebbles? dust boulders? – and see the whole work not just as a likeness or an image but a construct, like a work of tribal craft abandoned in a  Borneo bunkhouse and discovered, with a thrill of horror, by travellers from a more sophisticated world…..

The frame for Roeg’s face is like no other. It’s at once a gourd, a void, a plenum, a womb and a brain, pricked and festooned with symbolic artefacts, all of them expressive of the director’s troubling imagination. It’s an extraordinary encapsulation of the feral underworld that Roeg locates beneath all our civilised endeavours , our greed and pretensions, our hope of finding sense or love or reassurance in a world of barely –suppressed violence and fear.

Several remarkable ”mixed media” went into the construction of the Roeg portrait - syringe needles, lead weights, beeswax, a bee, oil, acrylic, linen, glass… The five hypodermic needles are coded in the colours (blue, green, red, white black) that, according to Rimbaud, correspond to the five vowels. Five lead fishing weights hang from them, silvered and gilded to form a dangling fetish object that draws together the Belgian Congo (where Conrad set Heart of Darkness) and the world of self-destructive need that characterised  Performance, Bad Timing, Walkout, Eureka, Track 29…

The dead bee perching on the gourd’s upper slopes is a nod to Napoleon, with whom Roeg shares a birthday (August 15) and who used to carry a bee-shaped amulet as a talisman. The matted mess of hair and traumatised flesh, which causes the viewer both to flinch from the exhibit and inspect it with horrified fascination, is a nod to two deaths in Roeg-world: the prospector who blows his brains out in Eureka, and the bullet that burrows through the rock star Turner’s brain at the end of Performance.

The monstrous flesh drum which implicitly encases the director’s imagination is a calculated assault on our notions about the purity of art. Like Rachel Whiteread’s inside-out house, it shows a mind turned outwards like a grapefruit skin, exposing its gross inner pith, its intestinal workings. It suggests that trauma, decay, revulsion, strange gods, odd superstitions and wayward playfulness are as likely to govern the artist’s vision as are clarity, harmony, structure.

It’s a horrible casing – both brain and belly, the first home of the slowly-gestating work of art, and its informing intelligence – inside which anything or nothing may reside. In fact, it contains two secrets. In mid-composition, the artist asked his subject for a secret, to be written on a slip of paper; Roeg complied and Clark wrote down a secret of his own. Both slips of paper are now inside the work, tantalisingly, un-get-at-ably secret, until the piece is opened up and it’s magic dispersed.

Michael Clark is a leading portrait painter, who has, for years, pushed the boundaries of portraiture as far as they will go. His combination of hyper-precision and bleached of portraiture as they will go. His combination of hyper-precision and bleached melancholy has been seen in portraits of Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher of Soho’s Colony Room, and the late Derek Jarman (Clark’s portrait of the last-named hangs in the NPG). Five years ago he branched out into anti-portraiture, wearied by the requirement that portraits must be likenesses of their subject.

 

His bold triptych, Some May Lose Their Faith, offered three landscapes of flesh with exploded wounds, livid in pink, orange and bruised blue. Since we can truly identify Christ’s dead body only through the wounds made by nails and spear, Clark argued, do not the wounds alone constitute a portrait? Later he blended the two dimensional portrait with the installation piece in Vanitas – a double-canvas that showed, on the front, the saintly face of Lisa Stansfield the singer and, on the back, a terrible flesh wound buried deep inside her; while a 24 –frame, one-second video clip took us through the strange journey by which it got there.

 

1/4 second film fragment 6 colour photographs - Collection V+A © Michael Clark