Private Lives

Private Lives pairs two artists: the painter Nuno de Campos and the photographer Magali Nougarède. These two contemporary artists create portraits of women based on the body: its pose, gesture, and unconscious language of expression. Their paintings and photographs delve past the exterior world of the visible and ordinary to uncover the hidden, private and personal spaces of the self. Their creative use of cropping, iconic focus on the female mid-section, and lack of any recognizable background space places their subjects in a tightly controlled, very intimate place where attention is solely paid to the body. In terms of visualizing women in art, this convention is hardly new, but De Campos and Nougarède are not interested in an overtly sexual image. They are looking towards the female body to explore other issues such as aging, gender roles, psychological insight, socially proscribed roles, and a general social/political inquiry. Their singular spotlight on the torso pulls the viewer into their subject's private sphere while, at the same time, keeping the observer at a distance by presenting the body as a blockade to any further narrative probing. Without the pervasive and easy recognition of their subject's facial features, both de Campos and Nougarède display their models telling body postures and expressive arms and hands in conjunction with various objects such as purses and penknives. Through the eyes of these two artists, ordinary private musings as well as quiet moments of a day become extraordinary and freighted with hidden agendas, emotional subtext, and a protective stillness that rubs against the composed atmosphere portrayed in these anonymous women.

The bodies of work from these two artists fall loosely into the category of portraiture, which has changed tremendously over the centuries with the addition of photography to what was previously the domain of painting and to a much lesser degree, sculpture. The powerful alignment of portraiture with a time-consuming painting "claimed to give a composite, even definitive, image of the personality--a formal representation in which was embodied an assumed status and public significance." Photography, on the other hand, was deemed immediate, in the moment, and more populist than painting. It came to adopt the visual codes that telegraphed status and personality from painting in order to bestow the sheen of respectability on a burgeoning medium. What has adhered to portraiture over time is its unique relationship that the image has to its subject, in the form of representing the sitter's identity and the likeness portrayed therein. Because of this aspect of mimesis (copying, imitation), portraiture was often assigned a low status in the hierarchy of art genres. The skill needed to capture a likeness of feature, as well as clothing, texture, landscape, interior surroundings and objects over the purely creative and inventive "served to relegate portraiture to the level of a mechanical exercise, rather than a fine art." Subsequent changes in culture and centers of art production altered the fortunes of portraiture as well. Seventeenth-century France held portraiture right below history painting (the highest ideal to aspire to) as a direct result of the subjects that were portrayed. These favored sitters were the most distinguished, royal, and learned in the society at the time. In the early Twentieth-century, modernism and the lure of abstraction edged out realism-based portraiture as a preferred realm of expression, as well as the continuing development of photography that ultimately supplanted painting's iron grip on the representation of the real in art.

In addition to portraiture revealing the identity and reasonable likeness of its subject, it also supposedly exposes some other sense of the sitter's character, personality, inner state, soul, and mind. Portraiture does represent more quantifiable characteristics of its subjects such as their gender, age, and social standing as well as the interior. The genre almost always dances between the two poles of specificity (in terms of the individual subject) and generality (representing a type, ideal, or convention).   "The idea that portraits should communicate something about the sitter's psychological state or personality...evolved gradually...after nineteenth-century Romanticism fuelled the idea of a personality cult...a fascination with the particular qualities, idiosyncrasies...of a celebrated individual." At the root of portraiture then, is this notion of the individual self and the presentation and definition of that self by its location in a certain place, time, or culture. Furthermore, portraiture explores how that self is characterized by shifting notions of gender roles, sexuality, race, age, and social standing. This complicated, ever-fluid set of variables proceeds to be transmitted through a physical set of features and limbs that belongs to the sitter. This mediated presentation filters through the creative proclivities of an artist in a portrait genre that also has its own set of proscribed rules and conventions that mutate depending on time and place.

Another issue raised in portraiture is the pose. Posing, by its very nature, suggests a passive, theatrical, and self-conscious act. Logically, the person posing is there to be seen, and positions themselves accordingly for a perceived audience. This acknowledgement of the observer would then seem to repudiate the notion that still clings to portraiture of reading features or the body as expressive of the mind or soul. How can the sitter be conveying a true state, or the artist presenting that truth, if the whole act is contrived from the beginning? Posing also suggests a social or cultural context that gets absorbed into the body through sheer repetition as various stock conventions of behavior that both idealize and personalize the sitter at the same time. "In other words, what makes posture legible in an image depends primarily on the fact that it is socially and culturally inscribed." Posing, as seen through portraiture, reflects "the external signs of a person's socialized self," a type of social masquerade where the sitter, artist, and observer all participate in the act of portraiture and recognize the conventions at play.  

            Nuno de Campos both utilizes and subverts many of the principles of portraiture as he creates artwork that deals with the presentation of the female body, primarily through the ancient medium of tempera painting and drawing. His paintings and drawings are small, intimate and infused with an extraordinary technique and compositional skill. Initially, he works from a photograph of his model, mostly to retain the veracity of material and light, but the final product is always acutely rendered in paint or graphite. The women in his art are of an indeterminate age, though not very young or old. They are rendered semi-anonymous by his choice to focus on their chests and lap and his omission and cropping of any defining facial feature. As a whole, the women he represents are rather active in their poses for the audience. On one level, his portraits can be contrasted with Philip Pearlstein's hyper-realistic, technically-savvy still lives. They include nude female models, which are usually cropped so that they are reduced to a series of disparate body parts and objects in a tableau. Pearlstein's models become incredibly passive in their poses, which only serve to enhance their objectness.

In the series titled Trip and Knife , clothing becomes another factor that both enhances the anonymity of de Campos's women as well as adding another physical and conceptual layer on top of the painting. In Trip #1 (fig.1), de Campos presents a small, square-format painting of a youngish woman in a brightly colored and decorative dress that looks like it was made in the 1970's. She is absent-mindedly dragging a toy version of a VW bus along her thighs and the artist presents her to the viewer in a relaxed, sitting pose with her dress riding up along her legs, giving a restrained hint of her sexuality. There is not much personal information to glean from this, but the artist drops various clues in terms of the dress/costume, body language, and the small fetishized object to start the viewer on a narrative path. The dress looks to be mass manufactured, but highly stylized and decorative, rather like wallpaper. This association of female body with decoration serves to render the subject's power as a woman in purely visual terms, no different from advertising or most of the history of western painting. The tight compositional focus on her lap suggests sexuality, motherhood, and the possible existence of a family. The toy bus that she absently plays with could point to escape, family ties or even a certain possession of her body by another who knows its landscape well. Most telling, de Campos presents his model as she is lost in thought and renders her oblivious of the viewer. She is still in a pose that needs the awareness of an audience, but she also remains unconcerned about the effect that her actions have on her intended viewers. In this sense, her face is unnecessary. A viewer can tell by her body language and by her absorptive actions that she has withdrawn into herself. Where does this then leave the viewer? The artist has presented us with a female body, wrapped up in a decorative dress, but hidden her sexuality and unique physical traces to a degree that she becomes anonymous. Furthermore, he portrays her in a state of contemplative withdrawal, so that she is not really present to interact with the viewer. De Campos has visualized the main problematic of portraiture and creates "a fiction of distraction, posing [his models] so as to make it appear that after setting up to be portrayed and observed, one's body holds the pose but one's mind has wandered." In this sense, truthfulness may be returned to the posing model, as her real thoughts are breaking through the barrier of the conventional pose in her disregard of her audience.

In Knife #3 (fig.2), de Campos presents the same type of cropped pictoral format as Trip #1 but in the medium of drawing. His technical mastery of the medium is evident as he depicts a woman in an abstractly patterned, anachronistic, very decorative dress handling a tiny version of a Swiss army knife. In this drawing, the focus is on her hands with wedding ring, midsection, and the object that she holds within them. In a humorous way, the artist presents his take on contemporary gender roles through the medium of portraiture. The swirling patterns of her dress serve to abstract her as a subject and transform her into a type of religious archetype. The dips and curves of the dress accentuate her belly and womb, perhaps a subtle reminder of her sexuality, femininity, and her childrearing ability, versus the miniature knife with small cross as a symbol of maleness, the church, aggression, stunted virility and the vague possibility of violence.

A more recent series of paintings and drawings entitled Shirt presents a young female from collarbone to waist wearing a bright red t-shirt emblazoned with the ubiquitous image of the Argentinean Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. In Shirt #8 (front cover), the young woman is seated with her elbows resting on chair rails and her hands are knitted over her midsection. De Campos has chosen a highly recognizable pop cultural image of this admired individual while juxtaposing it against the anonymous full-figured chest of a young woman. The cropping in this painting is highly specific, as the artist cuts off the subject just above her fatty double chin and pins her into the picture plane by torqueing her body into an awkward position within the square format. Many associations come to mind with this highly charged coupling of images. The reproduction of Che on the t-shirt looks very romantic, nostalgic, and windswept, as if it was a film still. At the same time it carries with it associations of sainthood or even martyrdom in the disembodied head that floats on a sea of blood red. It also touches on urban legend through accounts of famous and beloved religious and pop culture figures such as Jesus, Mary, and Elvis that supposedly appear spontaneously on fabric that then become holy relics. This particular image has permeated American pop culture and can still be seen on college campuses across the nation. On another level, this portrait is a sly critique on the codes of advertising, which use female breasts and sexuality to sell all types of products. De Campos presents a full frontal view of this relaxed, anonymous woman wearing one of the most recognizable images of a man in the world. Her body becomes an afterthought, a mere backdrop for the distilled drama of Che to play itself out, thirty years after his murder. Her physical sexuality is more present then in some of his other works, but it is still subverted underneath the male image that she wears proudly on her chest. Furthermore, this painting connects to a history of portraiture, more specifically, to Las Meninas , by Diego Velazquez. In that canvas, the artist is seen painting a portrait over to the left. Center stage is the Infanta Dona Margarita, her handmaidens, dogs, and various courtiers. In the background is a mirror, depicting the royal couple, King Philip IV, and the Queen Mariana. This couple, centered in the painting, becomes a stand-in for the viewer. Who is being seen and who is doing the seeing bounces back and forth in this complex painting. De Campos plays on this history by centering Che in the middle of her chest where the audience would see their own image. In this instance, the viewer becomes part of the painting and subtly implicated in the social, political, and gender related currents that run through the piece.

Magali Nougarède, like Nuno de Campos, specifically focuses her attention on women and their body language transmitted through particular cropped images. There are two series represented in this exhibition: one is Toeing the Line (2000) and the second is Crossing the Line (2002-2004). Toeing the Line presents a succession of square-format and richly-colored photographs that are portraits of various older residents of Eastbourne, England. In this cycle of portraiture, the artist delves into what it means to conform to social expectations of age through telltale visual clues of body posture and clothing. Crossing the Line investigates the same themes, but adds the counterpoint of a younger generation of adolescents to examine any shared values or ingrained differences that arise between women living in the same geographic area, but separated by a broad expanse of time, war, differences in national identity, and life experience.

At its heart, her photographic essays, like Nuno de Campos's paintings and drawings are about female identity. How that identity shifts through time, how age, loss of sexuality and beauty relegate women to the invisible margins, and how this identity is defined, both in private and in public. Furthermore, Nougarède's photography wonders how a specific society, and now a global culture, molds that identity through images and through the overwhelming amount of products consumed. She considers how individuality is portrayed through various everyday mundane rituals, and how the self can be both hidden and revealed through infinitesimal changes in body posture, especially when confronted with the realm of the public. In terms of public presentation, Nougarède's series has certain aspects in common with a pioneer of photographic portraiture, August Sander. His Citizens of the Twentieth Century was his attempt to capture an entire social stratum of the German people between the two World Wars. His portraits are divided into social archetypes: farmer, skilled tradesmen, women, artists and present class difference and hierarchies within the groups. His portraiture was both clinical and empathic, as he endowed his ordinary subjects with an archetypal quality and a degree of romanticism that chafed against the very detached, archival parameters of the project. Sander photographs "a society on show--a public space in which the self has meaning only in so far as it has access to that public forum." His monumental archiving of society demonstrates "the extent to which we show rather than reveal a face in any public context." This also holds true with Toeing the Line and Crossing the Line . Nougarède, like Sander, empathizes with her subjects and presents them as if they were embodiments of archetypes of the Middle Class British Elderly Woman. At the same time, she hones in on the miniscule details of posture and dress that gives these women their uniqueness as well as their humanity and vulnerability.

On the Safe Side - from the series Toeing the Line (front cover), presents an elderly woman in a thin, but bright white cardigan sweater as she protectively pulls her transparent blue bag up close to her chest. Nougarède gives her subjects no space to breathe or move in her tight, cropped composition. She forces the viewer to acknowledge her often-overlooked subject as worthy of attention, while utilizing the centered, iconic, and formal conventions of painting to convey a timeless sense of self imbued with personality that can transcend its own skin to become something larger. Every aspect that the photographer chooses to display telegraphs the fragility of this woman. Her mottled, bony hands that are drawn into her chest in what appears to be an instinctive protective gesture. Her lightweight sweater that doesn't protect from the elements and her diaphanous bag, which gives the viewer an illicit peek into her private life. The transparency of the bag could be a metaphor for the personality and body hiding behind, but it also becomes a perfect illustration of the nature of photography and the fine line that it treads between public and private, showing and revealing. Hovering over this series of images, and made explicit in this one, is the tiny postage stamp of Queen Elizabeth II that is on the torn envelope inside the bag. For British women of a certain age, no one else sets the standard on conduct and represents the pinnacle of class than the Queen. She is reduced to a stiff ubiquitous portrait, but her presence and authority seems to permeate the two photographic sets of women that are so formal in their public personae.

The Dead Rabbit - from the series Toeing the Line (fig.3) further elaborates on the presentation of ageing female identity. In this photograph, like many in the series, Nougarède chooses the reveal a body covered, without any identifying shape. Nougarède defines the photograph by lighting, angles of body posture, and clothing decoration. A woman sits in a beautiful sky blue winter coat, one that looks like it has been carefully preserved over the years. Hands rest easily, but resolutely on a thick black purse. Everything points to a woman in control, but the image still has more to say. Looking closer, the threads of her leather gloves are coming undone, and her purse is worn at the edges. On the right side, Nougarède includes the sinuous ripple of her coat as she sits, which contrasts with the straight vertical edge of the seam in the middle. Nougarède's photographs, like predecessor Diane Arbus, are an isolating presentation in terms of staging, theatre, and psychological effect for however candid they may appear. This aspect alone ties her work more closely to painting. Painting is imbued with time and the work that goes into displaying a fully realized person. Photography gravitates to the instantaneous moment, to make it significant. Nougarède blurs this distinction by moving these two ideologies together.

In The Very Shy Lady - from the series Toeing the Line (fig.4), Nougarède presents both an anachronistic image and hides her subject as she sits there in harsh, bright, illuminating sunlight. The figure is seated, swathed in a flowered dress and plaid coat, wearing soft, steel gray gloves. Her fist is clenched in her lap, a very active gesture that leaps out from all the clashing patterns and textures. Age is impossible to figure, though the type of clothing and gloves worn can point to either an older woman or one wearing a costume. Nougarède seems to gravitate towards a type of woman in which clothing plays this dual role of being both costume (theatrical) and supremely ordinary. Her isolating type of photography reinforces the garments that these women wear as armor and the fact that they are present in their bodies but have also disappeared behind the fortress walls.

Both de Campos and Nougarède create portraiture in which a female body as a body is inaccessible but subject to social conventions and pressure. They try and let those bodies speak its own specific language while also hinting at the individual identity behind the screen of the physical. The transformation of ordinary moments into extraordinary narratives frames their portraiture both in psychological and aesthetic terms. The ritualistic/serial element to both projects encompasses the full spectrum of emotion that surrounds women from the devotion to a religious or family figure and the obsessive consumption of body imagery that remains unattached to a mind. Their posing subjects don't signal the traditional passivity of the female, but telegraph a composed, almost willful demonstration of an inner self that on some level refuses the framing of the artists.

Lisa Hatchadoorian, Curator

October 2004

Bibliography

Clarke, Graham, "The Photograph," New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, pg. 103.

West, Shearer. "Portraiture," Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, pg. 12.

Ibid., pg. 29.

Ganz, Sarah, "Body Language," New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1999, pg. 81.

Ibid., pg. 30.

Berger, Jr., Harry. Representations 46 , Spring 1994, pg. 102.

Clarke, Graham, "The Photograph," New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, pg. 114.

Ibid., pg.114.