Nick Lepard : Isabella
June 5 – 28, 2008
Artist Reception: Thursday, June 5, 6 – 8 pm
Portraiture is an equation involving the sitter, the representation of the sitter, and the artist. Just as symbols are abstractions of reality, so too is a portrait an artifice of identity.
The sitter, once having agreed to be painted, is immediately in jeopardy. A portrait struggles to squeeze an incompressible amount of evidence through a pinhole. In reality, the sitter is huge. He is a massive conglomerate of action through time, something amoebic, ruled only by the totalitarianism of change. The portrait fails the sitter because he will inevitably outgrow it as he moves forward in time physically and psychologically.
However, by asserting that an individual is a collection of evolving parts and not simply one thing one moment and then another the next moment, gives him credit as a single entity. There must be an element to which all things are bound, a core or essence, a noumenon. My practice describes the struggle for knowledge of noumena rather than phenomena, which is influenced by perception.
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Isabella:
If an artist attempts to define the sitter, he is declaring that he has knowledge of something intrinsic. The portrait becomes a statement that he understands the world and its constituents outside his own perception of it. What tool does the artist use to gain this information? How can he be certain it is fact and not opinion? Can an individual be consumed without the subjectivity of the consumer? If not, and the true nature of self cannot be transmitted to the world, how is the public supposed to be convinced of its existence? Does one own his identity or does the public have equal rights to its definition?
Conversely, does something’s inability to communicate itself negate its existence? Doesn’t the individual exist despite an incapacity for a single objective representation of it? If so, is each member of the public removed from the truth of another member? Is the result a community of people separated individually and confined to incurable states of being misunderstood?
This series of works anthropomorphizes this dichotomy of truth vs. opinion. The works are given the feminine title, Isabella, as a reminder of what is absent from the room: absolute truth. Present instead are seven different men — seven different representations — each with his own perception of her. |
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 detail from Beliefs About Progress (below)
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