Beyond the Face | Girona

Beyond the Face: the contemporary portrait

November 6 - Janauary 22 2021 | Contemporary Art Center Les Bernardes in Salt – Girona (Spain)

Curated by Laura Cornejo Brugés

The exhibition «Beyond the face: the contemporary portrait» brings together in Les Bernardes the exhibition projects by the artists Andrea Morucchio, Andy Warhol, Olivier de Sagazan and Jordi Abelló, four eclectic sensivities with a recognized trajectory, which with interdisciplinary languages approach in a core of works the genre of contemporary portraiture. 

Through drawing, photography, performance and video art, an expository dialogue is formed on the aesthetic significance of the face in art. The expressive capacity and the critical and thoughtful attitude of these artists challenge the representative canons of portraiture showing how this continues to generate controversy within our hypervisible society. 

Morucchio, Warhol, Sagazan and Abelló invite the viewer to rethink concepts intrinsic to the practice of portraiture such as the identity,
subjectivity, temporality and reality, by creative dialectics between the appearance and the concealment that instigates visual thinking. The heterogeneity of their artistic discourses reveals the constant need to renew the semantics of the portrait beyond the face, towards the being who animates it.

The Venetian Andrea Morucchio, one of the most interesting contemporary art creators in Italy, is exhibiting for the first time in Spain a selection of the «Puzzling Pop» photo series. The artist revisits some of the famous portraits of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, using a digital collage technique, which with the juxtaposition of fragments and photographic details of butterfly wings deconstructs the original morphology of the faces. 

With this intervention, the subjects are endowed with a new visual texture, due to the chromatic alterations and the expressive traces of a puzzle that renews its sense of individuality, updating the truth about the portrait: its constant mutation that doesn't allow to fix any cultural or historical image with complete precision. While calling into question the perceptual and symbolic processes of Warhol’s icons, Morucchio warns about the homologated gaze of media systems.

Together with five other works from the "Puzzling Pop" series Morucchio presents "Puzzling Pop" Video Experience, a video-musical work. The works printed on aluminum are polychrome reinterpretations of Warhol's portraits (Ali, Mao, Marilyn, Venus) through the use of thousands of pieces obtained from photos of butterfly wings. In this exhibition they are posted on specially painted walls with colors matching the dominant chromatic shades of the works. This chromatic harmony that integrates and expands the physiognomies of the portraits, together with the music / rhythm of the video that fills the exhibition space, make the setting up an installation space. 

The video performs a deconstruction / reconstruction of the portrayed faces. Single square tiles that expanding reveal an extremely fascinating shape and aesthetics follow one another on the screen, following a regular rhythm at first and then appearing and disappearing in reverse together with the formation and disintegration of the faces of the portraits; the rhythm of the musical piece by Leonardo Di Angilla directs the visual structure, giving a sense to the consequentiality of the entries and exits of the images that determine the visual flow of the work and makes this sixth work in the exhibition extremely engaging and magnetic.