The Brooklyn Rail

When I read an essay in the papers there is often a cute little drawing or photograph of the writer looking serious in the heading. When my daughter sends me a message by WhatsApp, she often includes a little pictorial avatar of herself. That’s cute too. It makes me smile. It’s a kawaii world.

I want to call it the simplified head. You see it everywhere, not just in art. A head described with a few lines, or computer generated on a screen. The bland but recognisable face of Shrek or some princess. It is not a new thing; the ability to evoke a person with a few lines has always been the particular skill of the caricaturist. But in the age of the emoji, it has neither the venom nor the affection of the caricature. What is so problematic with this meme is the glibness.

When I go back to the UK, I put the face page of my passport on the scanner and look at the camera. The computer recognizes me, that is to say my identicality with the digitalized image in the passport, and lets me through the border. It’s great! I don’t have to queue for hours: sometimes I pass straight through in ten seconds. But it is also creepy: such facial-identification will be a godsend for any tyranny.

Where does the old notion of a portrait sit with this? No, I am not a grumpy old man saying everyone must go back to the life room. Would that work anymore? Is it not telling that the most famous portrait painter of our era, or certainly the most expensive, has been Lucian Freud? But what do his paintings tell us of his sitters? Other than that they agreed to pose in his dowdy, anonymous studio and that they are made of flesh, sludgy flesh at that. Anyway, no one is going to learn to paint portraits like Frans Hals or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. How do we get round this? How can we evoke not just the appearance of a person but their intellectual, spiritual, cultural world? We have to learn to use the skills and tools we have.

Recently in the Philippines, where I live and work, there was a two-part exhibition of portraits at MO_Space.¹ I supplied an introductory essay on the history of portraits, “Fayum to BGC.” Sixty artists showed work that could have been claimed as portraits. But most evaded what some might think a portrait should do: give some sense of a person’s personality or presence. Nona Garcia’s painting of Roberto Chabet, elegant though it was, can typify that general evasion: her portrait was of the back of his head.

As part of A Dollar and a Day: Angelo Villa (Farmer/Artist), Leslie de Chavez presented a video portrait of a Filipino who survives by working as farmer, artist, and father. His wife works as an OFW (Overseas Filipino Worker) in Taiwan. Some of his paintings were presented on the floor nearby and overhanging it signifying the economic situation that forces families to separate and work abroad to survive, a giant US dollar in twenty-eight sections each hand drawn by an OFW with a gold pen.

An honest portrait now may mean, as here, allowing the sitter some degree of agency, or if they are dead or otherwise mute, that they be treated empathetically.

In another 2023 show in Manila (Geraldine Javier at Silverlens Gallery) the artist included portraits, or evocations, of five people who worked with nature: Derek Jarman, Jane Goodall, Maria Sybilla Merian, David Attenborough, and Leonard Co. The faces as painted or stitched could be described as simplified heads, but there was a whole lot else going on. Leonard Co was a leading Filipino botanist who was shot in 2010 by the army. The soldiers claim he got caught in crossfire with the NPA (New People’s Army). The family disputes this. What we see in her portrait or evocation of him are layers, plants etched into encaustic or embroidered, the names of plants from Co’s book, Common Medicinal Plants of the Cordillera Region, written in green ink, and gold leaves falling. Embedded in this is a simplified head and shoulders of Co examining a plant. A simplified head, but part of a complex, multi-layered work evoking what he did and why.

As a matter of political or moral necessity in a possibly pending age of authoritarian governments, portraits must embody and defend the complexity of the individual. Context and intention matter.

1. An artist-run gallery in BGC (Bonifacio Global City), Manila. This is well illustrated and discussed on the website: mo-space.net. A Portrait of a Portrait: last exhibition of 2023, first exhibition of 2024.