Amid billions of selfies, getting a portrait painted is back in fashion
One's own face on the walls of one's home. The digital native generation rediscovers the power of the physical portrait, commissioned by great contemporary painters.
by Marina Mojana
8' min read
8' min read
Among eight billion faces on the planet, it is not possible to find two that are truly identical, and the idea that each of us has at least one living double seems to be a groundless legend. We are unique and unrepeatable beings and we communicate this to the world primarily through our face. We all have a face and every day we have to deal with those of others: our very identity has always been linked to our physiognomic features. Every morning we look in the mirror and make a decision: we comb our hair, put on make-up or simply check that everything is in order. "At that moment we ask ourselves what to do with our face: it is not an elbow or a shoulder blade, it is a significant object," explains graphic designer Riccardo Falcinelli, who has dedicated a book to the subject, Visus. Storia del volto dall'antichità al selfie (Einaudi). "And even if we are not Rembrandt, for each of us the face is something to think about".
Obsessed with our image - with 93 million selfies taken every day in the world, a figure for 2020 - we try to fix it in the moment in an era, the 21st century, in which everything seems to be fluid and relative. Perhaps because we confusingly feel the desire to leave a lasting trace of ourselves, to experience something that is not an adventure or that is not consumed in a twenty-four-hour story on Instagram.
But how to try to stop time? The answer - less banal than it seems - is to have a portrait painting done. The genre, which has never really waned, is experiencing a surprising revival and this is not only because many are choosing to have their portraits taken by prominent contemporary painters. For example by Kehinde Wiley, born in 1977, a black artist from Los Angeles, known for having immortalised Barack Obama and for his highly realistic paintings of African Americans in heroic poses.
Painting wins out over photographic portraits that fade over time and also over videos, which will become unreadable as soon as the technology behind them is outdated. It may seem a paradox, but Generation Z, the first of the true digital natives, preferentially collects physically tangible and solid works, primarily paintings. The painting transmits our image to those who will come after us, and having one's own face hung on the walls of one's home (alone or with that of one's loved ones) is becoming a trend in contemporary collecting, confirmed by exhibitions, books, television programmes and scientific essays.
The starting point for a figurative investigation of the subject remains the exhibition The Soul and the Face. Ritratto e fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon which was proposed almost thirty years ago by Flavio Caroli at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Between Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man and Francis Bacon's lump of flesh is the modern Western man's representation of himself, his greatness, his transience and perhaps his destiny. Until 29 June, instead, an anthological exhibition of around 300 self-portraits by the most famous painters in the history of art, from the 15th to the 20th century, The Portrait of the Artist. In the Mirror of Narcissus. The face, the mask, the selfie. But what does it feel like when we look at a portrait and what does the painter convey to us? "We were created to look at each other", wrote Edgar Degas, who took the omnibus to Paris every day to immerse himself in a crowd of faces, to penetrate into their souls, to grasp the expressiveness of their gaze. The first ones he portrayed were those of his Italian relatives. Not yet 20 years old, in 1854, he had stopped in Florence, the guest of his aunt Laura Degas - wife of Baron Gennaro Bellelli, a Neapolitan patriot in exile - and his cousins Giulia and Giovanna. The gestation of the Portrait of the Bellelli family, now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, was very long (1858 - 1869), but in the end the artist succeeded in expressing not only what appears, but also the interiority of each character posed life-size.
