Last week, I was invited to take part in an event to discuss the remarkable paintings selected for Face|Time, an exhibition of contemporary portraits at Dellasposa gallery. The underlying theme of the exhibition is to explore the idea of portraiture through different artists and to re-examine our relationship with past portraiture.
Face|Time a gallery view, photograph by Philip Berryman
The exhibition, with subtlety, astutely positions itself as the anti-selfie exhibition. Indeed, unlike selfies where the dialogue emerging from the portrait arises once the picture is taken, and where the act of performance is in front of the camera rather than in the making of the works, here each portrait is a 'collection of evidences', gathered during the encounter with the sitter. Somehow, the faceless subjects of Wanda Bernardino could be red as a reflection of online identity and its various form of anonymity (from trolls to crowdfunding, which reminds me of the anonymity of the 'new' patrons of art in, for instance, Jeremy Bailey's work).
The paintings curated for Face | Time very much radiate their presence and emotional power to the audience by focusing some of their language on faces and hands; not so dissimilar from Van Dyck who creates a poignant encounter viewer/portrait by reducing the confrontation to faces and hands. The light shed on gestures and faces is also the result of the treatments of backgrounds. Indeed, the scenes deployed in the paintings are not specific or figurative contexts. In Isabella Watling's Billy the various densities of colours which constitute the backdrop, by contrast, highlight the face. I would argue that this aspect of the painting also plays a part in the sense of timelessness given by the exhibition. In Simon Davis' work, the use of the square brush technique produces a tension between subject and background which clevery blurs the sense of perspective. This also reinforces the sense that Davis' portraits, as for instance Manooka, are very cinematic, like stolen moments out of a film strip.
Face|Time plays with the boudaries between time past and time present to propose an almost geological texture of time. The exhibition illustrates how portraiture transcends the capture of a single moment in time to reveal a layered temporal composition which is meant to live beyond the life of the artist or the sitter; as it is evidenced by Wanda Bernardino's work, where subjects are extracted from historical painitngs. A mutli temporality is prescient in the arworks curated. First, there is the time of the encounter between artist and subject, then, the time of making the work -the process of painting- when the identity of the subject /sitter, as perceived by the artist is constructed (and where the studio relationship between artist and subject gives birth to another work of art as in The Importance of Being Glenn by Isabella Watling where Glenn wrote his book The Way Back to Florence). Then there's the time of the encounter with he viewer in the gallery space. The conflation of all those temporalities is striking in the work of Isabella Watling and illustrates beautifully a form of elasticity of time.
By erasing the face in There's No Reason Not To, Wanda Bernardino seems to reconfigure the relationship between body and face, not only in the painting, but also in the viewer’s mind who’s invited to reflect on her/his relationship with her/his own body. It opens up an altruistic space where artist, sitter and viewer can relate to one another. Her approach seems to symbolise a moving away from the face to shed a light on the gesture and the body as constitutive parts of identity (this is where one could argues that this painting is ‘anti-selfie’). Indeed, the faceless portrait, Day Dreamers, for instance, reminds me of the use of masks in Greek theatre as a device to facilitate the catharsis process (where the anonymous surface of the mask becomes an easier space to appropriate and on which each member of the audience can project her or his own emotions). It is an invitation for the viewer to fill the gap, and to take part in the work. Bernardo is appropriating individuals from historical paintings and offers them as a gallery of characters to inhabit. The invitation to participate, from an imaginative point of view, is also papable in Watling's work where the veils of transparent pigments and the scale of the paintings produce an immersive experience.
By appropriating existing portraits and blanking out some of its parts, Bernardino appears to deconstruct and question, not only the canon of British portraiture, but the very notion of identity. Each painting seems to be asking: who are you without your attributes? One could attempt a Freudian reading of the work and its identification process by appropriation, where a subject constitutes her/himself progressively by the appropriation of an external object. The absence of context (be it social, economical, cultural) in Foreign is expressed via an abstraction of colours, which with its energetic brush strokes, encourages the viewer to think identity differently.
The sophistication of the colours creates by Isabella Watling, the sensitivity to the elusive pose of the sitter, the attention brought to the clothes remind me of not only Rembrandt but also of Giovani Boldini and John Singer Sargent's portraits. As such, Isabella Watking’s painting transcends the techniques of the Old Masters and picks up references in different eras up to today. Just as much as, for instance, Gina and Cristiano can be red as a palimpsest of the different hours of painting with Cristiano, it is also the testimony of her own art historical research. Watling presents the result of her journey in a blend of pigments that she creates and which makes The Importance of Being Glenn an fusion of Impressionist vitality, Flemish Baroque inspiration and 21st century sensibility. Indeed touches of abstraction in the detail of a pocket or in the corner of an armchair remind the viewer that this is definitely a contemporary work.
To me, Fregio by Sabatino Cersosimo proposes an fascinating dialogue between two different narratives. The piece seems to be engaged in an oscillation between a state of realisation and a state of disappearance. Rust, usually a sign associated with the ruins of industrial revolution here performs the work. Like a piano composition for four-hands, rust becomes Cersosimo’s painting partner and performs a score that beautifully blends evocation of Pompeii's mural paintings with industrial imagery, in a series of sci-fi medusas. The painting very much embodies the passing of time from a very materialistic point of view. Thus, the reading of the faces depicted can be twofold: an accomplishment from rust, or the irreducible part of identity that rust cannot corrodes. Cersosimo’s representation of identity differs from Bernardino's in as much as, here, the faces could either be symbolising the latest fragment of identity or the first ones.
To me, the success of the ensemble of pieces presented here lies in their capacity to pivot the attention of the viewer to the inherent qualities of portraiture by painting and, as such, offer a true investigation of the medium from within. In other words, here, the exploration of the medium, and the means by which it is conveyed, mirrors the exploration of the sitter’s identity.
Face|Time at Dellasposa gallery, photograph by Philip Berryman
Isabella Watling, Billy, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, photograph by Philip Berryman
Wanda Bernardino, Foreign, Oil on paper, 2016, photograph by Philip Berryman.
Sabatino Cersosimo, Da un'altra parte, 2016, Oil and oxidations on ten welded steel plates artist 100 × 100 cm (39 2/5 × 39 2/5 in.), photograph by Philip Berryman.