This new series (2019) is a part of creative process wishing derealized the self-portrait, photographic gender that I practice since the late 1990s by digital perspective.
Here, my photos are made from my real face that I deform or transform. Sometimes I represent me like a woman or by juxtaposition of two different self-portraits modify on the same image. Each self-portrait is mark by various expressions of my moods and affects very changing from one to another.
In this sense –many years ago— the discovery of carved self-portraits called “heads of character” by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) which are very expressive, grimacing and crossed by hallucinations remain a reference in my work: unconsciously, they opened the way to the expression of pain, ugliness, horror and madness.
Self-portraits of this series have a fundamentally disjunctive aspect. I deconstruct the human figure, mine, or imitating a different face, by superimposing on it drawings with rather organic forms, also I add basic geometrical shapes: lines, ovals, circles, squares, stars five-pointed, and even words.
This polymorphic ensemble allows me to release from the composition superficial depths that enrich the surface of the photographic document. I magnify facial features, most often the eyes, which infuses an effect of horror and derealisation of the self-portrait. I have no interest for mimetic, realistic or naturalistic representation and neither for aesthetic of beauty.
In this innovative formulation of self-portrait a fundamental question remains, the famous “Who I am ? ”. Curiously, this question is manifest in the image by a destruction of the first object: my face.
