Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Pantalone - Fran Bull, c. 2016

Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Pantalone by Fran Bull contains a rich intertextual allusion. The “Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing” portion of the title refers to William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium, while “Pantalone” refers to the stock character from commedia dell’arte, traditionally associated with Venice, old age, wealth, suspicion, appetite, and comic self-importance. Pantalone is often imagined as an elderly merchant figure, driven by money, status, desire, and control, yet continually made ridiculous by the theatrical world around him. In Yeats’s poem, old age becomes an opportunity to turn away from sensual life, which is destined to fade, and toward a more permanent form of being through the cultivation of the soul. Bull’s work places that elevated spiritual aspiration into dialogue with one of theater’s most worldly and grasping figures.

This tension feels deeply aligned with Bull’s exhibition We’re All at A Party Called Life on Earth, a larger-than-life body of work that celebrated an almost Dadaist existence through caricatures drawn from circuses, amusement parks, and commedia dell’arte. Rather than treating life as a solemn march toward transcendence, Bull frames it as performance, absurdity, disguise, and spectacle. The soul may clap its hands and sing, but in Bull’s world, it does so while wearing a mask, surrounded by color, appetite, chaos, and comic exposure.

The piece features an abstracted face of Pantalone, rendered through a dense convergence of blue, red, yellow, green, orange, black, gray, and white. The figure does not appear as a conventional portrait. Instead, Bull constructs Pantalone as a restless accumulation of marks, a mask-like presence caught between theatrical identity and painterly eruption. The long blue protruding form on the left side of the composition suggests Pantalone’s traditional hooked nose, one of the defining features of the character’s mask. It extends outward with comic exaggeration, making the face feel both recognizable and strange.

The central mass of the work is crowded, active, and richly layered. Circular eye-like forms, black splatters, looping lines, and cellular bursts give the figure a charged psychological presence. Unlike the clearer facial structures in some of the other works from the series, Pantalone feels especially congested, as though Bull is turning the character’s inner appetite and social anxiety into visual form. The face seems to be made from competing impulses: greed, vanity, suspicion, performance, and survival all pressing against one another.

Bull’s color choices intensify this sense of instability. Turquoise and blue create the dominant profile, while hot orange, red, yellow, green, and black ignite the interior of the figure. These colors do not sit calmly beside one another. They collide, bleed, and interrupt, as though Pantalone’s personality has been broken open and scattered across the paper. The result is both celebratory and uneasy. The character appears animated by life, but also overwhelmed by it.

The white space surrounding the figure is essential to the work’s impact. Against this open field, Pantalone appears suspended, isolated, and theatrically lit. The paper becomes a stage, and every splatter, drip, and line becomes part of the performance. The marks radiating outward from the figure suggest motion, nervous energy, and comic unraveling. Rather than presenting Pantalone as a fixed character, Bull captures him in a state of exposure, as though the mask itself is beginning to leak.

The linear passages on the right side of the composition add a particularly electric quality. Thin red, blue, orange, and black lines stretch outward like wires, nerves, or theatrical strings. They make the figure feel entangled, as though Pantalone is caught in the very systems he tries to control. This is fitting for a character so often defined by possession, bargaining, scheming, and desire. Bull transforms that social and psychological entanglement into a visual network of color and motion.

Bull’s handling of abstraction allows Pantalone to remain present without becoming literal. The image gives us enough to locate the mask-like face, the exaggerated nose, the animated profile, and the suggestion of theatrical costume, but it never settles into illustration. The figure stays in flux. He is part old man, part merchant, part clown, part soul, and part painted eruption. This instability mirrors the nature of Pantalone himself, a figure who moves between authority and foolishness, wealth and vulnerability, control and comic collapse.

The Yeats reference deepens this reading. In Sailing to Byzantium, the soul seeks a form that might outlast the body’s decay. Bull’s Pantalone complicates that ambition by giving us a figure deeply tied to the aging body, to appetite, to worldly attachment, and to the absurdity of social performance. He is not purified into spiritual stillness. Instead, he is transformed through art into a vivid, enduring symbol of human contradiction. The mask becomes a vessel for animation. The comic figure becomes a site of spiritual and theatrical energy. The soul does not escape the party; it performs within it.

What makes the Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing series unique is how sharply it diverges from the series that came before and after it. It sits like the middle layer of a three-tiered abstract birthday cake, pressed between the Sophia and Tar Pits series, which share more recognizable motifs with one another. Here, Bull gives us something distinct, vibrant, and refreshingly theatrical: an abstract expressionist work filtered through humor, performance, literary reference, and symbolic disguise.

Soul, Clap Hands, and Sing: Pantalone is ultimately a work about aging, appetite, and the strange theatricality of human desire. Bull takes one of theater’s most worldly comic figures and gives him visual intensity, spiritual resonance, and painterly vitality. Pantalone becomes more than a miserly old merchant or masked fool. He becomes a fractured performer clapping his hands and singing from the middle of life’s absurd party, a figure who reminds us that the soul is not cultivated outside of contradiction, but through it.