Beyond Portraiture is a series of paintings and drawings that link reality to the imaginary, while exploring what I call the “crisis of representation.” It is an attempt to create tension between varying signs of visual culture, and the layered illusions of identity and/or narratives that some of these signs create in terms of history, memory and the imagination. The portraits are about confronting difference, the artworks play off what portraiture is meant to do, implying psychological familiarity. The paintings’ treatment of the subject is meant to relate the inexplicable and the discarnate state of dreams while examining specific textures of experience and presence. Through visual language, I wish to control the viewer’s focalization through the physicality of the image and the ability of light, shadow, color, faces full of shapes, and pattern to become metaphors for space, presence and memory. The faces communicate both a representation of dark and light, and likeness and enigma. I want to capture the existence of the “other”; psychological and cultural familiarity is presented as intimate, yet masked, strange, and foreign. The portraits are given physical weight and psychological interiority. Paul de Man writes that “the metaphoric crossing between perception and hallucination occurs by means of the paraphernalia of painting, which is also that of recollection and recognition as the recovery to the senses, of what seemed to be forever beyond experience.” Painting and drawing embody subjective narratives and reality. They allow a dialogue to occur between the viewer and the painting, and the painting and the imagined history of cultural and intergenerational space, time, and identity, embodying critical narratives that are beyond portraiture.
