Successful portraits deliberately confuse the person they portray with an image of that person, producing a “likeness” which fulfills the proposition, “This is Ms. or Mr. X.” The two-dimensional surface of the painting generates and reflects a network of gazes: the subject of the portrait looks a... Read more
Successful portraits deliberately confuse the person they portray with an image of that person, producing a “likeness” which fulfills the proposition, “This is Ms. or Mr. X.” The two-dimensional surface of the painting generates and reflects a network of gazes: the subject of the portrait looks at the artist; the artist returns the sitter’s gaze; the painted portrait “stares” at the viewer; and finally the viewer returns the portrait’s “gaze.” The finished picture compresses the time used to produce the image into the illusion of a single moment, which aligns the sitter’s “present” with our own. What is depicted in a
portrait is less an idealized person and more an idealization of time. Projected amidst pieces of furniture that have been wrapped in moving blankets, Likeness (2009) appears as though discovered in a temporary holding space or a warehouse for the transit of personal effects. The film refers to a 1659 portrait by Diego Velazquez of the child-prince of Asturias, Felipe Prospero. But rather than showing the sitter, it links together a variety of reproductions of a detail from the painting: a small dog, lying in a chair, gazing directly at the viewer. A voiceover addresses the young prince, unpacking the dense network of relationships (both human and animal) out of which the portrait is quite literally constructed. Likeness conceives of portraiture as a mode of conceptual painting, one which asks who or what can be a subject, and why we so actively project onto images,
imagining that they “hail” our attention. Caterina van Hemessen is 20 Years Old (2009) takes as its origin a 1548 self-portrait by the painter Caterina van Hemessen, which is considered the first known self-portrait of an artist depicted working at an easel. The installation is comprised of a 16mm film—bounced off of a mirror and across the gallery onto a freestanding screen—and a series of framed texts. The film shows enlarged fragments of the portrait, replacing the original whole of the painting with a representation of the activity of looking (as the viewer’s eye might shift from detail to detail.) The texts appear illegible at first, but are in fact printed in reverse and can be deciphered using small hand mirrors, revealing a series of written “reflections.” The installation places us where van Hemessen stood in relation to her own image; reflected within the perspective of the present, her image hails the viewer and synchronizes, for a moment, our time with hers.
