A curation by Natalie Slater, Curator at Singulart - ‘Masked’ brings together a focused selection of Fabien Delaube’s portraits, where faces are built through layering, fracture, and repetition rather than likeness. Paint behaves like a surface under pressure—peeled back, split, reassembled—so identity feels provisional rather than fixed. The faces never fully arrive. They are constructed, interrupted, and deliberately incomplete. Masks act less as disguises than as structures: rigid, graphic, and slightly misaligned. Eyes meet the viewer, but never all at once. Symmetry is suggested, then broken. Recognition stalls. What’s left is a portrait language that resists clarity. These figures don’t perform emotion or narrative; they hold a tension between exposure and control. Nothing is resolved. Nothing collapses. The image stays upright, intact, and quietly withholding.