I am currently engaged with the theme of portraiture and its limitations and possibilities in contemporary art.
Based on historical photographic source material which I find online, I create drawn images on lithographic stones, interpreting what I see on the computer screen. Using old paper I have collected over the years, I take prints from these stones.
The portraits I am interested in conform with formal aspects of portraiture (head and shoulder) but contradict the conceptual aspect (facial features are hidden). They are prevented portraits, aiming for ‘the real’ and representing a graphic truth whilst evading the very same, occupying a space between the depcited and myself as their producer. I see my practice as a way for analysis, a method to question the images of ourselves. The deviation between the portrayed and the given title bereaves the image from its comfortable conventions creating an impossibility. The lithographic stone is the mirror which reflects everything simultaneously, the familiar as well as the paradox. The distance between myself as producer and the subject, between the depicted and the observer and between the reproduction and the world is made to disappear by the construction of the work and its title, which in return leads to a strange emphasis of the very same. Thereby these portraits are less about self-reflexivity but rather aim for a reconsideration of the relationship between portraits and the perception of ourselves.
These prevented portraits overcome the distances of time, space and individual, they are portraits that do not portray.
august 2011