Regarde-moi

This group exhibition Regarde-moi (Look at Me) plunges us into a contemporary portrait gallery featuring around forty works.
The portrait – a classic among the classics of representational art – is a timeless practice. It is a memorial narrative, destined, today as yesterday, to speak of intimacy and absence, to exalt the mystery of faces and bodies, and to lose itself in an interiority or a history, whose sources can never be openly avowed.

At the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, one can admire the Portrait of Paquius Proculus and his Wife. Like the Fayum mummy portraits, this ancient work attests to the longevity of the art of portraiture, a practice that has endured across time and cultures, constantly adapting to the technical inventions that changed the art of human representation and to an accelerating globalization. From this poignant fresco fragment detached from its wall to the contemporary practice of the selfie, the history of this artform and its methods continues to be written, century after century, creating an imaginary museum of known and unknown faces, of celebrities and anonymous people, of deceased friends.

— Jill Gasparina