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Antoni Tápies, painter. 1999
The alterations through time or any other seemingly simple action, like closing your eyes, changes the identity of a portrait. Formiguera has worked many years with the alterations imposed by time to the bodies and faces of his models, people always close to him. He has seen them as something foreign to his artistic intentions, even foreign to the decisions of the people portrayed. Time is really what alters things, what shapes those faces, those bodies that, as it turns out, are us.
The face has always been the most faithful sign of identity: that gaze that survives time, those features through which we manage to recognize those friends we left behind long ago, those relatives almost unknown that emerge from our childhood, those lovers of our youth that return, as if to say goodbye, in old age. But Formiguera portrays his models (all of them well-known people in Catalonian culture) with their eyes shut, as if closing the windows to the outside world, preventing us from probing their minds, their feelings. Close-up portraits of faces with their eyes shut, as if refusing to establish a connection with the viewer. With the eyes shut, it seems as if the soul cannot come out. It seems we can hide, even from ourselves. It's as if the face was no longer a sign of identity.
(Translation: Marina Torres)
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© Photos, texts: Authors & SEACEX
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