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Enrique Àlvaro. 2007
Series: Compuestos (Composites)
Until now, our identity was closely linked to our faces. Not only the face was the mirror of the soul, but that face represented who and what we were. That's why the portrait genre has reached, both in painting and in photography, an undisputed relevance. However, the portrait is no longer -if it once was- a way of identifying an individual, and beyond that obviousness, it has also ceased to recreate any real identity. The series "Compuestos" (Composites), 2004-07, by Germán Gómez, straightforwardly shows the absolute uncertainty behind a face and the end of that idea of identity. His portraits of men are "composites" of fragments of other faces, of other features, of other men.
Their parts cut out and substituted with other fragments, each face is a combination of pieces from four faces, four different identities. Put together they don't generate a new identity but rather a decomposition of the previous individual identities. Each portrait is the face of someone that doesn't exist but is part of four identities, of four different realities, unrecognizable but present nevertheless. The combination of a forehead, two eyes and a nose makes a face. Their loss decomposes an identity. The certainty of knowing who we are is shaken as we see that, just like the scissors and the photographer's camera, the surgeon's scalpel adds and takes away parts of ourselves, creating, recomposing a being of which we are a part, but not the whole.
(Translation: Marina Torres)
Print version - all texts
© Photos, texts: Authors & SEACEX
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