Exhibitions, Italy, Firenze, 09 September 2015
The exhibition "Evolution of the portrait" aims to highlight the transit and the historical path between the portrait technique bound to reproduce somatic traits and the one that tends to the deformation and deconstruction of the canonic image, to the loss of man's distinctive features. The word Portrait indicates, in the history of art, a sculpture, a painting, a picture that represents an individual, characterized by a precise phisiognomy or by symbolic elements that allow to identify the personality by recalling the function or the social status of that person. The origin of portrait is as old as time, as it spontaneously manifests itself during early infancy; man's insinct to define himself and others through a representation seems primordial.
To portrait oneself and other, thus, two actions that became daily for milions of people, in some case even obsessive, indicate the compulsive need to be there. But what remains after our appearences are translated into images? Portrait in comtemporarypresent era tends, as opposed to the past, to lose pertinent and tangible traits, its celebrative and idealizing aura of the subject, framing it through new visual codes.
In contemporary portrait we can observe continuity with the past, incontinuity, expansion, deformation, cancellation, but the almost universal emotional participation that can be felt inside makes us, although evolutionally changed, recognized in the same genre because it moves us , because portrait identifies us as individuals: historic age, society and statement of change.
"....What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance". F. Bacon
To portrait oneself and other, thus, two actions that became daily for milions of people, in some case even obsessive, indicate the compulsive need to be there. But what remains after our appearences are translated into images? Portrait in comtemporarypresent era tends, as opposed to the past, to lose pertinent and tangible traits, its celebrative and idealizing aura of the subject, framing it through new visual codes.
In contemporary portrait we can observe continuity with the past, incontinuity, expansion, deformation, cancellation, but the almost universal emotional participation that can be felt inside makes us, although evolutionally changed, recognized in the same genre because it moves us , because portrait identifies us as individuals: historic age, society and statement of change.
"....What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance". F. Bacon
Comments 0
Say something