2024

Painting as Make-up

This series of portraits, titled "Painting as Make-Up",  explores the relevance of painting today. It connects the medium of painting to the concept of make-up, addressing themes such as the fabrication of facts, the post-truth era, and the manipulation of history. The series also examines how individuals construct their self-image on social media.

The project consists of about 10 oil paintings (5 completed), each measuring 40 x 50 cm, depicting portraits. The series is inspired by the idea that many ancient sculptures and architectural elements were originally painted, though the exact colors are unknown despite various recreations.

In my paintings, I bring realism to sculptures by applying skin tones and textures, influenced by Dutch Golden Age painters (Frans Hals, Jan Verspronck) and French 19th-century painters (Manet, Delacroix). My ongoing 20 years of experience as a digital retoucher for fashion and advertising have provided me with a deep understanding of skin textures and colors, which I incorporate into my work.

The skin texture in one of the portrait draws inspiration from Japanese Noh theater masks and 17th-century Netherlandish paintings, emphasising the presence of skin.

In this series, I also include contemporary figures, such as V. Putin, to evoke the notion that these characters play roles today. For Putin's portrait, I painted him as a teenager so that there is an ambiguity about who that person is, and placed his image on a sewing mannequin to symbolise a mask and theatrical play.

I connect these portraits to one large panoramic  photograph that I reconstructed by composing together images from a sequence of the movie: “El Angel Exterminador” by Bunuel (1962). This sequence shows the moment in the movie when a supernatural curse falls onto the characters listening to the music being played: they cannot leave the living room anymore.

Title of the photograph: “Cut Through the living room of the exterminating angel “, Lambda print on Kodak paper, 150 cm x 70 cm

When exhibited all together, I want to suggest that the characters depicted in the oil paintings portraits relate to the ones seen in the photograph made from the Bunuel movie.

The overarching goal of this project is to create an exhibition as a theatrical tableau, in which different characters point to a tragedy yet unknown, but that is about to happen. 

Through combining  these oil paintings and the photograph, I want to evoke a sense of the tragedies unfolding in our contemporary era.