
Gallery Façade. Los Bravú, November 2022.

Exhibition view.

Ela Fidalgo. De ente et essentia VIII (2022).

Exhibition view.

Grip Face. Left: Deconstructed generational mask #01 (2022); Right: Don’t tag me I’m a digital addict (2022).

Exhibition view.

Grip Face. Traslapo victimista #06.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Luján Pérez. Siestecita de verano (2022).

Luján Pérez. De Tanum a la eternidad, cariño (2022).

Luján Pérez. Autorretrato I (2022).

Exhibition view.

Julia Santa Olalla. Vidriera cubana (2021).

Julia Santa Olalla. Left: Vidriera cubana (2021); Right: Autorretrato (2022).

Julia Santa Olalla. Left: Vidriera cubana (2021); Right: Autorretrato (2022).

Exhibition view. Carla Fuentes.

Carla Fuentes. Left: Self selfie (2022); Right: Cámara trasera (2022).

Exhibition view.

Gala Knörr. Camarada Britney (2022)

Los Bravú. Left: Con la mayor alegría del mundo (2022); Center: Las sombras irreales os velan vuestra vista, haciendo que creáis que habrá una recompensa (Vánitas) (2022); Right: Reconozco que se me caen las lágrimas (2022)

Exhibition view.
Information
Selfie
Los Bravú
Grip Face
Ela Fidalgo
Carla Fuentes
Gala Knörr
Luján Pérez
Julia Santa Olalla
Curated by Ester Almeda
Palazzo Grassi welcomes us late in the evening, while the sun is starting to set. The exhibition ‘Open-end’, by Marlene Dumas is the last top of our 72-hour trip in Venice, and our feet are starting to feel numb. Venice, a city where cars, motorcycles, and scooters do not exist, whose only available means of transport is the vaporetto. I, a millennial born in the (wrongly named) glass generation, who cannot, however, get on a boat without taking Dramamine, decided that this trip will be entirely on foot. Seventy-two hours to see the Venice Biennale, to find a church in every corner, and to visit all the exhibitions the city has to offer in a year like this.
We sit down on a bench to enjoy the work ‘Spring’, by Dumas, which is almost a promise that the cold that was beginning to run down to our spines will be over soon. At that point, I get a notification: ‘It’s time to BeReal! 2 min left to capture a BeReal and see what your friends are up to!’. I think the cherry on top for the chronic anxiety of our generation is to download an app that sets a time limit to post a selfie (and thus unlocking the pictures that your contacts have uploaded). The hook of this app is that the alert may appear at any moment of the day, no scheduled times, generating a feel of spontaneity and artlessness to the post. Be real. Another excuse for limitless vanity.
I post a selfie, with one of Marlene Dumas paintings in the background, and I see a small painting at the end of the room, in which Dumas portrays two hands holding an iPhone. It is unknown if somebody is taking a selfie or just browsing the Internet, since the screen is black. It is like a mirror that absorbs the very image of the person standing in front of it, and does not reflect a thing. A black hole. Narcissus’s heritage: we have reached the point where we have drowned so many times after falling in love with the reflection that a screen flashes back to us that we do not know if any of those versions is real.
I resort to Narcissus myth neither because I am an expert in Greek mythology, nor because of my botanical expertise about the flower that bears the same name, but because of the adjective we so often use against someone who is obsessed with their own image: narcissistic. Narcissus story is that about a man who drowned on his own reflection: it is possible that this is the first relevant account around self-image that we know of, and that defines pretty accurately our generation: Narcissus falls visibly in love with a bodiless image, or more precisely, with a fiction. [1]
At the beginning of this year, a friend was telling me that, during one of his Tinder dates, he had been unable to keep a fluent conversation with his date, for she was constantly looking at a spot behind him. Intrigued by it, after a while, he turned around, and realized that what she was staring at so eagerly was her own reflection on the mirror that was hanging at the back of the bar.
A few days later, the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out. On the TV news, several Russian influencers would appear crying and claiming: ‘My life has been taken away from me! [2], after learning the news about the Kremlin shutting the Instagram app down in the whole country. Content creators with millions of followers in one social network, completely erased in an instant. The income based on promoting a brand through their own image disappeared, due to political pressure, and with no option to counter, except migrating to another platform.
The social foundation between the daily act of instinctively looking at our own reflection on a store window while walking down the street, to the institutionalization of the selfie as the foundation of content creation, out of which millions of people make a living today, is the same. And we cannot blame ourselves: in 1890, Oscar Wilde published the Picture of Dorian Gray, which is nothing but a darkest version and a less naïve one than Narcissus, and, with this work, he puts a mirror in front of us: what place does beauty hold in our social and power relations?
Similarly, Jerry Saltz wrote in 2014: ‘We live in the age of the selfie. A fast self-portrait, made with a smartphone’s camera and immediately distributed and inscribed into a network, is an instant visual communication of where we are, what we’re doing, who we think we are, and who we think is watching. Selfies have changed aspects of social interaction, body language, self-awareness, privacy, and humor, altering temporality, irony, and public behavior. It has become a new visual genre—a type of self-portraiture formally distinct from all others in history. Selfies have their own structural autonomy. This is a very big deal for art.’ [4].
Selfie is a new genre, with its own logical form, structure, codes, and intentions, which grows and multiplies so quickly that it may presently be one of the biggest cultural testaments of our age. In this exhibition, we showcase the work of seven Spanish artists that work around the portrayal of the human being, the exposure of the public image online, and its interpretation through painting.
[1] Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals (2019), catálogo de la exposición (Nueva York, 2018), David Zwirner Books, p.77 1
[2] Peraica, A. (2017). Culture of the selfie: self-representation in contemporary visual culture. (Theory on Demand; No. 24). Institute of Network Cultures, p. 46
[3] Trias, E. (2022, 16 marzo). Los influencers rusos lloran el cierre de Instagram. La Vanguardia. https://www.lavanguardia.com/gente/ 20220315/8125336/influencers-rusos-lloran-prohibicion-instagram-putin.html
[4] Saltz, J. (2014, 27 enero). Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie. Vulture. (https://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie. html)