persona
A person is nothing but his image
(Milan Kundera, Immortality).
When we look around and regardless if we are in the virtual or real world, everyday life pelts us with images of people, most often their faces. We will have to watch them, even if we consciously do not want
to. Our eyes are saturated with representations of persons known to the general public, but also of persons less known or unknown, sometimes so much so that the eye has to struggle to truly see when looking into a real, live,
present human face. From the moment when the artist became aware of this experience, the Portraits project was born.
Unlike the now long-gone days ago when portrait was a sign of status and prestige, today the main “enemy” of the act of portraiture (and the reception of portraits as a work of art) is not the lack of money or the importance of the
person portrayed, but the inundation of public and virtual space with representations of people, resulting not only in the laziness of the eye but also a suspicion is born that our minds and hearts also become indifferent. Does
compassion fatigue, a well-known symptom in people who have long been active in the helping professions and civic initiatives, have its variation in the visual field, where repetitiveness and redundancy give birth to
desensitization. To what extent do the selfie culture and the focus on our own visual representation determine how we behave, what we feel, whether it encourages or impedes us to have quality communications with others, enables us
to establish authentic and close relationships, or drives us away from them? What is left of our image when an unmade, un-aestheticized, unplanned feeling breaks through the crack of the moment, exposing vulnerability and humanity?
To put it bluntly, how many faces fit in the eye per day, without the eye becoming tired and insensitive? These are just some of the questions that are the foundation of this project.
The intention of naming individual portraits by the names of emotions, that is, character traits, was to create a reaction for the observer. When he/she looks at a portrait, they see an unknown person, another face among probably
many he/she saw that day. But when they read the title of the portrait instead of the person’s name, they are confronted with emotion or trait that is familiar to them, either through personal experience or indirectly. At that
moment, the unknown face is given a new layer of meaning, a possibility of recognition is born, which can create discomfort, or conversely, this recognition incites a sense of closeness or compassion with the unknown person.
Otherwise, if the observer first reads the title of the portrait, this necessarily creates expectations that are grounded in one’s own understanding and experience of the listed emotion or trait, and only then faces the image of an
unknown person, this may also trigger a sense of recognition, or exactly the opposite may occur. Instead of recognition, a surprise occurs, a moment of confusion when one must reconcile their own expectations with the new and the
unknown. In this sense, the Portraits project “plays” with the observer in order to engage their emotional states, to stimulate them to introspection and self-inquiry, and to soften the seemingly solid boundary between the observer
and the observed. New scientific discoveries in the field of neuroscience and quantum physics often refer to this relationship and its inseparable connection when they claim that there is no ultimate objectivity, in a sense that
when the observer observes, they do not see what is, but what they are. In other words, what we see is perceived only within the referential fields that are familiar to us, and in this way we “shape” the one we look at according to
ourselves. In this sense, the act of observation is completely individual at the same time, since the interpretation of what is seen depends on only one actor, i.e. on the observer and inherently twofold, because the observer can be
what he is only in relation to the observed. Of course, this is the case in observing any work of art, but in the case of portraits, it gets an additional communication dimension, because it is a one-on-one relationship, devoid of
the mediator and entirely based on the individual.
Therefore, one of the intentions of this project is to create a counterpoint for the omnipresent media practice, which formats and exploits the faces of people, their portraits in a binary key, appealing - unappealing, happy -
unhappy, desirable - undesirable, depending on the product or idea a particular portrait sells or promotes. thus, provoking the observer into inquiry. Can a face entitled “Impudence” at the same time appear calm, focused and
harmless? Is vanity actually playfulness? Does Boredom also secretly include comedy and is there stubbornness in Doubt?
All these questions, like the ones mentioned earlier, also lead to the question of intimacy, a concept that strongly defines not only this one, but also
my other projects. Intimacy necessarily implies nakedness, and it implies vulnerability and the associated feelings of fear, insecurity, sometimes shame and discomfort. Intimacy is also closely related to the concept of closeness
and to the question of how much and how can we feel closeness with a portrait of an unknown person. When we observe, if we do not see what is, but what we are, when we look at the other, if we remain indifferent and/or unchanged, is
it because we are desensitized to others, or in relation to themselves, or both?
When it comes to the technical aspects of the project, approaches have been selected that amplify the universality of all these issues, that is, the goal is not to offer, in a visual sense, any distraction from the primary content
of the portrait (human character) and his or her “name”. A refined and reduced approach to the techniques used deliberately evokes photography and relies on the duality and simultaneity of black and white, which is the inherent
duality of the whole project, in terms of confronting the concepts of self - other, known - unknown, expected - unexpected, unknown – close.
Obviously, this project opens up a wide space to many questions where the observer is left to, if they wish, create their own answers, the contents of which depend largely on his/her character traits and his own preferences and
emotional states, or we can say that the observer is asked to sketch or examine their own “portrait.”