The old rule of stage acting – never turn your back to the audience – is a way of ensuring the viewer always feels tacitly acknowledged, an implied awareness of why the events of the play are even happening. In Aglaé Bassens’ paintings, the turned, concealed or invisible face creates the opposite effect: the viewer feels shut out, with the narrative of the painting obscured and open to question. This sense of removal and distance is at the heart of Bassens’ attitude towards painting itself: sometimes “immersed in the act of painting, at other times removed from making and … looking analytically.”