Over past 4 years my works have been focusing on the relation between memory, face and identity. I have been developing memory series, starting by sets of personal and daily experience using variety of media, video, photography, painting and one that often considered as residing in the realm of ‘low crafts’, such as tapestry or embroidery. Lately I have explored the intra - medium tendency to talk about the essence of image and the issue of intertextuality along the history of art.
My last two solo exhibitions (2008-2009), I transferred many photographic images of human portraits into large-scale paintings, in which the images are deliberately made vague in some part. I presents again the issues of the inaccuracy of memories and human perception regarding faces and figures on the plane of images. The face is indeed an inextricable part of the body, but if the depiction of the body appears alongside with that of the face, the face will be the more prominent part and it attracts the audience attention better.
Just as the face will be our center of attention when we are with someone else, and all of our communication will be directed to the face. Sometimes even the body can be represented by merely the face.
It is not coincidence that my works are largely done in intense monochromatic colors - almost entirely in black in white. Since the beginning of my career, when I started to work intensively using the medium of photography, I have been interested in ‘another world’ that is present in black and white pictures. Indeed, pictures of black and white have today existed as a specific language of expression. The choice of black and white is appropriate, as it strengthens the imaginary and mysterious impressions of the faces.
My works also refer to works by Christian Boltanski, which are also black and white, gloomy, and memory inducing. However, unlike Boltanski works that are deeply related with the memory of the sheer loss of lives during the holocaust in the time of the Nazi, my works are far from such memories. I talk about more personal matters. Even if the figures in my canvases indeed talk about “loss,” then such “loss” refers more to the awareness about the transience of human lives. As an artist context, I’m also asking the objective of posing “question,” “problem,” or perhaps also “doubts,” just as Boltanski once said, “The function of the artists is not to transmit news or information, but rather to ask question, postulate problems, or posit situations.”
In this exhibition, I present embroidery, painting and mix media (digital prints retouched with oil paints). For my new works, I “produce” the images by self, starting from choosing, directing, photographing and constructing the models. My painting and my digital prints on canvas are not much different, this is because the digital prints have been retouched with oil paints. There are, however, still parts of the digital prints that are I left as they are; presenting therefore intriguing contrasts and vague. The series of painting and digital prints precisely constructed to be in the process of becoming better defined, like the process in which our memories become more distinct.
Each of my work has merely one figure. Faces in my works present sequence of faces in mysterious and unreal appearances. It is provides the image someone’s faces, not somebody. Actual detail of how we remembers someone, especially face as we enter into another world, a world of uncertain boundaries between real and not real. Through the limit of our memory, in fact we should not remember the face of someone in detail. We catch only vaguely only. Painting or photos are present to bridge the limitation of memory and the fact the original. However, my artwork is still not reality indeed, but imitation of something similar or analog like the fact that.
Naturally my works reflects on my personal history and journey, so I want it related to people close to my life. That why the second black layer and blurred effect as signifying my effort to strengthen the impression about memories and personal intimacy. The idea of face, memory and portrait connect to themes of identity, representation, power, and nationality, providing artists with fertile ground for reinvigorating the depiction of what arguably the most intriguing of all subjects: ourselves and others. In the contemporary culture, the matter of identity—no matter how varied—is a reality that exists almost naked, without any pretense. There is almost no mystery nor personal spaces, due to the media penetration controlled by capital might. It seems that all constructs of identity are readily available. There is neither mystery nor surprise. Everything has become more predictable. If this is indeed the case, the faces in my works are ones that have abandoned their characters, dispositions, and identities.
Pauhrizi, Erik Muhamma
