TRASFIGURAZIONE Painting

When the function of the painting portrait was still one of rapresentation and commemoration, the model was had to sit for days and days, for months on end, and naturally the model was “different” in each new sitting. The painting was a kind of sublimated synthesis of what the painter each time found in front of him. Photography has engendered the concept of “instant”. The photographic portrait, no matter how elaborately produced, always captures the image in an instant. I recall a conversation between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon: D.S.: In the last few years, if it’s occurred to you to do a portait of someone, you commission photographs of them. F.B.: Yes, I would ask the same of friends if they came to sit. I prefer working this way. If I have the presence of the image there, I’m not able to drift so freely. D.S.: Why are memories more interesting and why does someone bother you? F.B.: What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance. Bacon worked with photography. From varied range of photos of his subjet he produced the portrait. Of course, it was not “realistic” but, as Bacon puts it, “distorsed”. I took a roll of 36 photos of a Venezuelan friend, a transexual prostitute of whom I’m deeply fond, for many different reasons. The shots were taken in rapid sequence in a matter of minutes. The six selected images, from which I made the six portrait, document the emotional tension of the photographic set, throught the expressive sequence and increasing distortion. As if from the light to the darkness. Or from life to death. The canvases are titled, each with a syllable from the word: “TRA - SFI - GU - RA - ZIO - NE”. Six syllables.