A Portrait.
The series A Portrait emerges from brief encounters in the underground, a space of enforced proximity between strangers, where direct eye contact often creates a sense of awkwardness. Absorbed in themselves, the faces often look downward. They rarely return the gaze or enter into dialogue.
The series A Portrait emerges from brief encounters in the underground, a space of enforced proximity between strangers, where direct eye contact often creates a sense of awkwardness. Absorbed in themselves, the faces often look downward. They rarely return the gaze or enter into dialogue.
Although the face is the most exposed part of the human body, its intimacy and vulnerability should not be underestimated. It carries traces of lived experience: moments of joy, painful disappointments, and the desire to express identity through different forms of adornment. Prolonged observation of another person’s face can feel disturbingly intrusive and, at the same time, unexpectedly compelling, even sexual. This series is provoked by this sense of duality between intrusion and proximity, and in a certain sense becomes both an exploration of the other and a revelation of my own vulnerability as the observer.
The process of making the works emphasises the gap between perception and image. The initial observation is translated into text. The text then becomes the basis for an algorithmically generated image, which I fragment and recombine before using it as a model for a watercolour portrait. This path from body to text, from text to machine, and back to a reconsideration of the body makes any direct fixation of the other impossible. The resulting image remains unstable and resists final interpretation.
Watercolour painting allows this sense of fragility and instability to be intensified. The fluid, translucent pigment seeps and dissolves, leaving transparent layers that reconstruct a complex realistic form on an otherwise empty surface. Facial features seem to assemble and disintegrate at the same time. Scale and proximity make the face almost corporeal, uncomfortably close and nearly physically tangible.
The portrait becomes not a fixation of identity, but a surface of tension, a place where desire, distance and vulnerability intersect. It seems to hold a state, a moment of presence that is already slipping away.