“48
Portraits" intends to negotiate directly with the famous series of
paintings with the same name, made by the artist Gerhard Richter. The 48
portraits of Richter were produced in 1971/72 and first presented in 1972 at
the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It's a 48 medium-sized
paintings (70x55cm), are black and white images taken from the encyclopedia.
They represent 48 European and American intellectuals, philosophers, writers, musicians,
scientists.
Richter
makes a process of historical survey. But this kind of encyclopedic index in
painting, is also a very personal and subjective look at what the author
considered to be the influential figures and characters of the nineteenth
century. All of them are white and male. There are according to Benjamin,
H. D. Buchloh and Robert Storr, like a demand by the painter of a
historical kind of paternal authority.*
The
exhibition will consists of 48 small scale paintings (16x24cm). They are
representations of unknown people taken from fragments of images found in the
Internet. These different "portraits" have in common the perception
of a given activity, a form of involuntary "index" of different
social characters. All these persons are disguised by masks or objects
that affect their individual identification. The conversion of these
characters unskilled in painting has the advantage of calling on the one hand,
the fragile concept of "social actor" in contemporary society, and
secondly, to point out the superficial nature of all social categorization in
process of open discussion. Thus, the convening of a random process in the
selection of pictures painted by the choices antinomy Richter, seeks to
highlight the relativity of the legacy of the great historical figures, as
opposed to a changing society and about which we know little.
The second
part of the exhibition will be composed of the video-animation “48 Portraits of Gerhard Richter”. This is a video
projection of a fragment taken from a photograph of Gerhard Richter himself in
70 years. In it, Richter calls us with a hand ready to shoot a camera. Repeated
48 times (2 seconds of video) this same image painted, seeks to explore and
enhance the effect arising from the unavoidable small differences that exist
between "frames."
This proposal seeks to establish links with the work of Richter, as well as the ideas that are (were) associated: power, fame, authority. The dialogue suggested by this work in particular is also a dialogue with a greater tradition: the portrait as a category, with its own history and genealogy. Constant is the desire to put into perspective the picture as a representation of the specific traits that make up the individuality of a person. Here we propose the opposite movement: to represent the loss of individuality in a very particular moment in our history.
Martinho Costa
October 2011
* Benjamin, H. D. Buchloh in 1996 in the
text: Divided Memory and
Post-TraditionalIdentity: Gerhard Richter's Work
of Mourning, and later in 2002 Robert Storr in
the second chapter of the text: Gerhard Richter: Forty Years
of Painting, makes reference to this reading.