-“You look familiar, do I know you?”




Something we’ve all been asked in one situation or another. This small exhibition of portraits by Rodrigo Cienfuegos asks a similar question, who are the people in these paintings, do we know them?




What is it we want when we look at a painting? What can we ask these paintings to tell us? Do these people have arms and legs? Do they have jobs or families? Are they alive ? Do they even believe in death? What can you tell about a person from a painting? Are there secrets asking to be revealed within the layers of material or is that a cliched expectation of what portraiture is for? What can we know about the painter from a portrait? Does he disappear in the face of another only to reappear in the image of an unexpected guest?




I’ve only seen these paintings in reproduction, I can’t tell you how big they are, if the colours are vivid or dull or if the eyes of these people follow you around the room? I can only tell you what I see, with my eyes 7000 miles away, digital abstractions of the painters activity.




Like cartoon characters trapped in a reality of their own lack of animation personalities become the paintings. A Face adjusts to suit its needs. It can stretch, bend, flatten and change colour. It is a bumpy malleable surface of feeling that somehow manages always to return to itself.




These works, crafted objects covered in pigmented slime, contain the layers of pretence and protection that individuals apply to themselves as patches of colour, sometimes the wrong colour, resting on an idea of the face. Like a verb anticipating its use, we have to ask ourselves do these individual, sloppy marks contain a history or clues to meaning? Meaning that we think we need.

Is this psychological or psychoanalytical material resting on paper or canvas? The greasy muck of constructed personas sitting on the surface of a painting, waiting to be somehow scanned by a futuristic machine so we can observe some emotional, oily, data?




As We make all sorts of judgements the paintings suddenly seem considerably more accepting of us than we are of them. They let us see their faults, their bravado their weakness. We imagine their lives their voices and movements, their dramas and histories.




Hang on! Isn’t that Jean-Luc Godard, the pretentious Swiss filmmaker and critic? He appears here in a portrait white as a ghost, wearing his signature tinted glasses. His skin seemingly stuck to the canvas. It brings to mind an incident that occurred during the Cannes film festival in 1985. Godard was about to enter a screening of his film when he was attacked with a custard pie to the face by a Belgian objector. The directors image captured as a slapstick memory of silent cinema in protest of the now. The painting identifies Godard as the complex character that he is upsetting or baffling many people in his constant need to make.




At the end of his film ‘Pierrot le fou’ a story of Love and crime on the run, the main character ‘Ferdinand’, played by Jean Paul Belmondo realises that his quest to avoid a bourgeois existence has become an unfulfilled failure. His inevitable demise ends in a peculiar penultimate procedure, Just prior to wrapping strings of dynamite around his head and blowing himself up. This final scene of self destruction is subverted by the obscure and radical gesture of our hero telephoning his family whilst painting his face blue. I don’t know why he did it but it is an extreme act of intensity that belongs only to him. As if his whole life was merely the build up to this moment, the opportunity to paint one’s own portrait on one’s own face.




The painting of Godard reminds me of this scene. He appears to be wearing a face mask, enacting some kind of healing or cosmetic repair. The paint not blue this time, he looks a little bit like a clown who has lost his red nose by wiping away the tears of his inner sadness.




There will be other faces you recognise in this exhibition. Some you will like and some you wont. Some you will dream of or lust after. Some you will make sweeping social, racial, sexual assumptions about and others you will immediately forget. Fictitious characters, real characters, heroes, villains. When we look at other people what we see is who we are.