Face au visage — Berthet – Aittouarès Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 11 → February 17, 2024

From January 11 to February 17, the Galerie is staging an exhibition focusing on portraiture and the face, in conjunction with the publication of Itzhak Goldberg’s new book, Face au visage¹, edited by Citadelles et Mazenod.

Born in 1949, Itzhak Goldberg is an art historian and professor emeritus at the Jean Monnet faculty. As a researcher, his work focuses on the representation and disfiguration of landscape and the face in modern and contemporary art.

Here his point of view on our exhibition :

Portraits or faces? The works brought together at the Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès exhibition oscillate between these two terms, which might at first sight be considered synonymous.

In reality, although they are closely related, they have each had their own parallel and distant fortunes. In modern art, the human figure is no longer subject to the imperatives of faithful imitation that characterised portraiture, and often does as it pleases. In fact, while Tal-Coat’s 1935 Self-portrait, in which the artist is shown in his studio, brush and palette in hand, still retains a traditional staging, the 1980 portrait, completely engulfed in matter, has lost its features for good. This face, like that of Jean-Pierre Schneider (Pierre de Wissant), embodies a confrontation between formlessness and form in the making, between line and mass. Here, the kneading process, a direct testimony to the creative process, results in figures of disfigurement that are inseparable from the material, in nascent forms that hark back to the idea of origins, of the archetype, of the ’primitive’ face in its matrix form.

Elsewhere, in Pierre Buraglio’s Hommage à Cézanne, the face, dislocated and fragmented, still resists, offering the viewer a few recognisable details, like a residual resemblance. Elsewhere, Boltanski’s grimacing faces in Saynètes comiques, The birthday from 1974, or the disturbing realism of the portrait of Monika, a homeless woman on the Avenue de Suffren painted by the young painter Sophia Fassi, or Nil Yalter’s “role-playing”, ironically disguised as a soubrette for an official dinner at the Centre Pompidou, are just a few examples of an ever-renewed face-to-face encounter.

Itzhak Goldberg

¹ Itzhak Goldberg, Face au visage, Citadelles et Mazenod, Paris, 2023.