Is it me?

When looking at a painted portrait we always ask who that person is. All other questions are secondary, such as who painted it, who the painter is, what year did they paint it, where, why, etc. Let’s try to answer the first question in the simplest possible way, not in painting, which now occupies an equivocal zone of our imagination and which currently remains in a state of indecipherability, but rather in arthouse or socially conscious cinema, which have a more direct and explanatory language. We could therefore start not from an image, but - remaining within the cinematographic sphere – from a suggestion taken from a dialogue, a simple reflection that the director Marco Bellocchio seems to offer us unwittingly, helping us to gain a better understanding of the reasons behind the Volti exhibition.. 

Bellocchio’s premise pre-empts themes that will later become more specific and personal during his conversation, when the interviewer asks him what new subjects he is working on. Out of the blue and in response, the director explains that there are 8 billion of us on earth, 8 billion people, all of whom are different, each with their own story, none of them the same, and yet, one might say, in this seemingly endless, confused crowd, every look deserves to be framed and every expression deserves a voice. 

So, as trivial as it may seem, the gist of it is this. Having unveiled the founding principle of cinema and, we might add, of human relationships, from which we can infer that all faces are worthy of our utmost attention, this is the firm point from which we like to begin.
 We could then go on to take advantage of the language of cinema and compare our initial question – who is that person? – with the dialogue between the two main characters in the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (original title Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), when the director, Céline Sciamma, with unparalleled skill and synthesis, stages the embarrassment felt before the artist when not recognizing oneself in the portrait she has painted. The director (who also wrote the screenplay) goes even further in the two-person dialogue, in order to make us realize that a painted portrait is never a question of technique, but rather of truth. And to avoid any twisted meanings, it is worth “listening” to the conversation between the two actresses, which is the cornerstone of the film. Marianne, the painter, when showing the painting, asks: don’t you have anything to say? 

The model, Heloise, stunned, replies: 

This dialogue restores the spotlight to the central role of the artist, not as an interpreter or a technician of pictorial artifice, but as someone who has transformed the experience of looking into an act of participation and responsibility, with the ability to merge gazes and overlap them, until, in unison, they have become knowledge. In life, in people and in the artwork. 

It is an emotional moment that materializes during the act of posing and that places both the artist and the model on the same level, with no distinction between their roles, in an unravelling of emotional, honest and true relationships. These are the relationships featured in Marina Abramović’s now famous performance, the artist is present (2010), where it was publicly understood for the first time how that cosmic energy, unleashed by the intense act of looking, can almost turn into a falling in love with the gaze and that it left the painter’s studio to become pure representation of vital tensions. The Serbian artist succeeded in conceptualizing a tension, capable of distorting to the point of temporal alteration, thanks to the effect of a shared gaze that leads to the modification of the state of mind, confirming that nothing about us is predictable in our relationship with others because thoughts can vary during this experience. Undoubtedly, something similar had already been happening for centuries, in an entirely private form, in the studios of painters who had posed their models, to give them a likeness in which to recognize themselves and in some cases to try to “steal their soul”! But how does the painter manage to pursue this state of mind in close relation to passing time and to freeze that which is not immobile? 

Before the advent of cinema, centuries of portrait painting had explored the obscurities and the wonders of the gaze, focusing particularly on somatic resemblance, on moods, on commonplaces, on psychoanalytical complexities and the infinite different aspects of people’s personalities. It is from this investigation that the need arose to review our appearances, perceived and narrated from a point of view other than our own, from a different perspective and with another “format”. This is what painting has done: layering colour upon colour, it has continually readjusted past time and brought it back to the present, without ever regretting it, it has worked in a rush, pondering and rethinking every wrinkle of the skin and chasing the flickering of the pupils, even when they remain there, staring, bored, looking into empty space, as we do when posing in front of a camera for a photograph. 

Painting was an active seismograph sensitive to every “vibration” between artist and model, a mechanism that photography could never afford and for which the painter’s eye seems to have been the privileged synoptic channel. A receptor listening to a dull patter capable of registering the energetic pulse and the conscious silence of life as it passes by, revealing unexpected secrets. 

Thus, one understands how the story of the simplest emotions has a pure origin and is rooted in the original need to be there and feel authentic in relation to others, without anyone being able to misrepresent our identity with a selfie or a shot taken “on the fly”, just to be able to say that I was there too in that moment. Portrait painting stems from this simple need and it is also the reason why it will never end, because painting has a physical, concrete, tangible and mysterious presence, and it requires dedication and time. This is the reason for its problematic dialogue with the present, “spoilt” by perverse and standardized forms of self-representation. 

The Volti exhibition is a 100-year narrative fragment, a surrogate focus of a subset comprising all 8 billion possible faces, each one worthy of being portrayed. It is also an exhibition that sums up 100 years of painting in a seemingly brief time, concentrated in a few hours dedicated to a small number of (unseen) Italian paintings. These sixty works come from Italian collections and illustrate a corner of the West, a very small area of the world, Italy (whatever it is!), where someone in their turn has been the director of a time that has gone and focused on a face that looked at them. And it coincides with our invitation: to look.