EventsAutoportraits
Exhibition
Autoportraits
In 7 days: February 5 → March 5, 2026
Every being
« For a thousand and one thousand years, the human face has been speaking and breathing, we still have the impression that he hasn’t yet begun to say what he is and what he knows ». Antonin Artaud
From Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn to Vincent Van Gogh and Helene Schjerfbeck, a great many artists have portrayed themselves, as an obligatory part of any artistic practice worthy of the name; indeed, Ludivine Gonthier testifies here that they have made it the almost sole subject of their research. For all that, self-portraits have long been called « Portrait de l’artiste », introducing a notion of distance between the subject and the performer, even if the model and the artist are alone and unique. Representing oneself is as much about «being an artist» as it is about ’being oneself«. The aim of this »genre« of self-portrait is to provide posterity with an image of the artist as he or she wishes to appear within his or her own work, or within the spirit of the times in which he or she wishes to inscribe him or herself. References to art history and its peers are far from absent: Courbet’s iconic « Atelier du peintre » (1855) is a case in point, as are the works of François Boisrond, Irini Karayannopoulou and Hassan Musa.
As Nancy Spector points out, the self-portrait « is situated in this vertiginous gap between what is represented, what is seen and what is known ». Certain artists therefore explored all the possibilities of "being" or "not being" in the image. The works of Damien Deroubaix, Irini Karayannopoulou, Stéphane Mandelbaum and John Stezaker bear witness to this, insofar as self-portraiture appears on the one hand as a complex and multiple field of exploration around this perception and affirmation of the self, and on the other as an expression of the vital importance of the artist as the actor of his own creation: to create is to “create oneself”. To the point, paradoxically, of "de-creating" oneself, as Damien Deroubaix proclaims with his masks in which all possibility of expressivity is gagged, or John Stezaker with his cut-outs in which he seems to exist only through his progenitors; an almost aporic self-awareness. And if, through the practice of the photo booth, Pierre et Gilles offer us images that are intimate and memorable, playful and poetic, their profusion nonetheless produces a form of vertigo that contradicts the very idea of a clean, unique appearance in favor of the shifting, transitory and elusive complexity of the human soul; the work of Célia Muller attests to this.
The nature of any self-representation is therefore far more plural and nuanced than we might at first think. So what of the Socratic « know thyself » that should have been at work here? Far from being a simple narcissistic projection or a representation of the naked truth of a being, is the self-portrait in fact just a text about oneself in the process of being written — Myriam Mihindou — or an image of oneself in perpetual development — John Stezaker? The games of the «I» are infinite…
Marc Donnadieu