A Portrait.

The Portraits series emerges from brief encounters in the underground — a space of enforced proximity between strangers, where direct eye contact most often causes a sense of awkwardness. Absorbed in themselves, the faces most often look downward; they do not return the gaze and do not 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 also the desire to express one’s identity through various forms of adornment. Prolonged observation of another person’s face can be disturbingly intrusive and, at the same time, unexpectedly compelling, even sexual.This series of works 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 — the intimate position of 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 watercolor 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, 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.