Interview with expert
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Interview with Marion Zilio
Marion Zilio is the writer of the book Faceworld : Le visage au XXIe siècle, which was of crucial inspiration for this exhibition project. The interview took place on June 25th.
Excerpts from the interview are hereby posted:
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Q: What do you think about the Covid mask?
A: Covid masks are complicated to interpret. It is complicated because the Covid mask is not, for example, a theatre mask. What I mean is that it is not a kind of mask that makes us appear and choose a specific identity we want to interpret. The Covid mask is an imposition to all, due to a state of political health emergency.
Q: In our opinion, the faces are going back to being subjects because of the Covid mask. What do you think about the effect of the Covid masks on the faces nowadays?
A: In such a period, people only manage to show their eyes, so just a part of their faces. No matter if they are black or white, poor or rich, they all have the mask and share a collective identity. Before wearing masks, the face was acting as an expression of human power. Now that we all wear the mask, instead, this power is not there anymore and we are going back to the same level and the same group and status, to show the same object and struggles.
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Q: In relation to the Greek concept of prosopon, do you think the mask is hiding the face or not?
A: The answer is both. Nowadays, the mask is linked to the current situation and conveys a collective/shared identity. On the other side, the mask limits individualism and selfishness. Somehow, the mask is hiding us and the question is what is hiding behind us.
Q: What is it hiding in your opinion?
A: On the one hand, the mask hides the individual version of human beings. This is also what social media do though. Let's think of how young people make use of Instagram or Facebook. On the other hand, the mask reveals that we are subjects and that it is important to differentiate this subjective identity. The identity is a part of the same concept. We talk about individualism, but the subjectivity is shared among humans, among animals.
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"In the past, before the 19th century and the introduction of photography, only rich people could see their actual faces through their portraits. On the contrary, poor people couldn't even see their faces. There were many limitation for people to see their faces".
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"There is one thing that we cannot forget. In order to have access to our own face, we need a mirror to reflect us; a photograph to show us our image and send it back to us. In other words, we always have access to our face, but for that we need technical support that returns our face to us. This is very important to remember. Nowadays, people have phones and Facebook, and it is very important that all people have access to their face and are given the possibility of constructing their own face. So that's why technology is not always bad. We can't reject technology but we also have to be careful not to be controlled or constrained by it".
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Interviews with artists
Each artist is interviewed in order to talk about their own practices as well as to share their opinions on portraits, the reproduction of faces, and the effect of the Covid mask on the face. On the basis of the preferences of the artists, some interviews were conducted via video and others via written form.
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Interview with Charlotte Vitaioli
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Interview with Lola Reboud
Interview with Ilan Parienté
Interview with Mireille Blanc
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Can you tell me a bit about your practice and the main media you use in your art?
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I develop a painting work, in oil on canvas or on wood, involving other mediums: photography, drawing.
I am interested in the enigmatic aspect of things; how the familiar, the everyday, even banal, can suddenly become strange. My painting is about the way things appear.
My work comes from the encounter with an already existing object or photograph. It is always a subject that imposes itself on me - an encounter due to chance. There is a great deal of intuition in the choice of the subject. And there must be a need to paint an image.
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Why do you paint portraits?
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If there was a genre that circumscribed my work, it would be that of still life, but there are also shifts between the object, the thing, and the question of the figure: the body is often there in fragments, or manifested by its absence (in handmade objects, cakes, etc.), or even in the idea of a lure (masks, figurines). The portraits are therefore always diverted, fragmented, suggested ...
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Can you tell about the works that you are going to exhibit during the exhibition Faceless Faces?
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"Elodie au masque" is a masked portrait, which comes from a family photograph, of my sister wearing a colored mask. In front of the subject, between this "portrait" and the viewer, traces of light are painted (those of the flash which reinjects light when taking a photograph of a photograph). It is the status of the image that interests me; it is about painting the reproduction of an image, the document itself, the photo taken from the album. It tends to drive my subjects away, and creates tension.
"Portrait" represents a crumpled sweatshirt on which two spots of black spray, two circles, appear like two eyes. A kind of blind ghost ...
Finally, "Portrait (red dress)" is based on an amateur black and white photograph, where only the dress has been colored in red, with a brush. Attention is focused on the garment, its drape, and taking this photo in its plastic wrap makes the face disappear, in the reflection from the flash. There are still clues, scraps of face.
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What do you think about the exhibition concept of Faceless Faces?
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The ambiguity of the project interests me. Question the limits.
In my work I like that there is a restraint of images, that everything does not emerge immediately. For me, this is one of the challenges of painting: the time it takes to gain sight. What is shown does not appear immediately, a doubt persists, until it tends towards a certain form of abstraction - I like to speak of 'thwarted figuration'. In ‘Faceless Faces’, there is this idea of upsetting the subject ...
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What impact do you think the Covid mask is having on the human face?
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It is obviously very complicated to answer this question. Even though the eyes express a lot, the part that also defines the identity is hidden - the nose, the mouth, half of the face. I have no idea what impact this might have in the long run, hope it's just transient ...
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Interview with Grégoire Laisné
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Can you tell me a bit about your practice and the main media you use in your art?
I mainly do paintings, etchings and drawings.
I like to mix several mediums requiring both manual and informatics techniques. All my work is dedicated to human face exploration.
My figures are rarely recognisable, often notched (etchings) or decomposed (paintings).
The technical side of the working process is embodied with the poetic aspect of my creation. This is why I really like to find my own technical process.
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Why do you paint portraits?
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Strangely this is not an easy question for me. There is not a precise motivation about why I paint portraits. I have always drawn portraits since I was young. I started to scribble little faces on the margins of my school papers and yet I never stopped. I use the face as a pattern with infinite potential. Like an obsession, this is where I combined all my dearest themes and intuitions.
Can you tell me about the works that you are exhibiting in our exhibition Faceless Faces?
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These two big engravings exposed are part of a series I began years ago and they represent large scale frontal faces. These are ink on paper, combining two etching techniques: engraving and monotype. I start to work on a metallic surface with industrial tools (grinding machine) and grave, in an abstract way, notches and lines structures space and score the matrix. I create for the upcoming image a potential of distortion. I don’t want to know in advance how the face I draw will look.
I am also exhibiting two paintings, one is a large size and the other one is a medium size. In my painting process I apprehend the surface not as a material, but a luminous potentiality. I use this light as an arm to pierce and break down the faces. Figures I paint have a confused vision. Their eyes – like mine – are mostly pierced with light then having clear vision. My work tries to reflect this fascination I’m feeling towards the screens, electroluminescent and hypnotic surfaces spreading images of our world.
What do you think about the exhibition concept of Faceless Faces?
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In this project the idea that wearing a mask can have a positive impact on face representation in our society seems to me very joyful.
The hidden parts of images were often used by artists to reveal and question the standard vision of human representation.
For example, people's smile, hidden behind the mask, is the expression we lack mostly now. But the smiles that are continuously in the commercials images, seem now even more fake and we won’t miss them!
I think your exhibition could reveal the difference between common and poetic vision of human face representation.
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What impact do you think the Covid mask is having on the human face?
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With Covid-19 and masks we were all disturbed in our recognition of each other’s identity. Consciously or not, this situation challenges our imagination, which is playing an important part in the process of identification when we cross masked faces. In my work I’d like the observer to take part in the interpretation. So that he could feel a very strong human presence despite the fact that he is not receiving all the elements of face recognition.
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Do you think this exhibition will have a positive impact on people’s point of view concerning masks?
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It's not easy to answer, because I don’t want to tell for others. Meanwhile it's always a good thing for people to question promptly and creatively actual problematics.