«You think I don’t understand? The impossible dream of being. Not of appearing, but of being … the abyss between what you are for others and for yourself, the feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to, at least, be exposed, to be analyzed, dissected, perhaps even annihilated… »
Monologue of the character of the doctor in the movie Persona filmed by Ingmar Bergman in 1966.
Bokeh means blur in Japanese. It is an effect used in photography by which areas of the image are blurred to, by contrast, give importance to other sharper ones, thus directing our gaze to the composition.
Unlike that resource, Adriana Tomatis presents us with a series of portraits with images totally out of focus. She does not seek to guide us; on the contrary, it shows us characters lacking in sharpness so that each viewer gives them their own meaning. Portraits to be reconfigured from opacity, according to the image or reflection that the observer needs to represent in his mind.
Tomatis’s paintings originate from photographs almost always made by herself. Episodes chosen for their gaze on various personal journeys. Trips now converted into internal exiles, due to the blur.
The exhibition is offered as well as the room of mirrors in a curiosity fair. An enclosure in which the paintings observe us as distorted reflections, whose distortions, however, reveal another reality, in a more effective and profound way.
Lacan said that the analyst returned to the analysand his inverted message like a mirror. And in this not perfect reflection the analysand recognized himself. But it is difficult to recognize us from the distortion of our image, even more, from the deception of the supposed sharpness.
Mirrors never reflected reality; they are inverse answers to a first question made image. Masks of reality that show in their lie the truth hidden behind the obvious.
Person means mask. That object that covers the face and does not allow it to be seen clearly, but represents the wearer’s desire, his desire to be, his appearance. Persona is also the title of the famous Ingmar Bergman film that Tomatis cites in two of the portraits shown here. Protagonists who look at their own reflection in a trance of role confusion. Interchangeable roles in which they recognize themselves through the other, not from themselves.
As in the painting in which the artist takes a photograph of us: a self-portrait covered by the camera. We observe it without seeing it while it captures us as an image. Staring and role-playing games.
The power of the image is not in the image itself, but in what we build in our psyche and retina from what we see. All this masked in a nouvelle vague aesthetic, of cold pastels that seem to speak of another time and another space.
Another identity: images that do not pretend to be but to appear.
Susana Torres, 2013
Exhibition Neurosis Histerica