A memory mirror and an instrument of social representation, the portrait has always been linked to photography. Faced with the control society and the media that have prevailed for fifty years, artists have reinvented this genre with unprecedented critical verve. Photographers and videographers hijack clichés and show that they do not reflect reality, but discreetly shape its canons and values. The works question the public construction of individual identity through the image, suggest the representation of the human being in the era of social networks and facial recognition.

 

In the contemporary portrait, the face becomes a singular and complex prism that eludes unequivocal interpretation. Confront or divert, hide or expose, distort, disguise, erase, reject ... gestures which, through the creative relationship between the subject and his image, defy the expectation of a manifest vision of the individual. This "face", which we find in the series Mannequins (2003) by Valérie Belin, shared by the twenty-six artists gathered at Centre Pompidou Málaga, becomes a space of freedom between oneself and the other, or the self as another.

 

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