maria teresa gavazzi :
Performance :
Radical Christmad@Red Gallery :  10
PERFORMATIVE PORTRAITS @ RED GALLERY

Stretching a pair of tights over my subjects’ faces and painting features onto them: eyebrows, eyes and mouth, I then photograph the results. The completed portraits, look somehow inquisitive and vulnerable. Under the painted schematic visage, perceptions are questioned, genders blurred and the image, somewhere between a painting and photograph, becomes poetic.
I use the disguise of the criminal to playfully address the themes of representation and identity, to create a different kind of portrait, a likeness but at one remove, intimate but ambiguous. Behind the nylon veil a person is obscured, mysterious, pulled by conflicting emotions. A sense of fear creeps in, fear of discovery alongside a desire to unearth the inner character.
It is my sitter who wears the stocking but in the end I am the thief.

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italiano