Paul Graham

This exhibition is a failure, first as a supposed attempt to present Portraiture in its

contemporary diversity. Indeed, many artists are tempted to reappropriate this “genre” and

approach it from a wide range of visual styles: archiving, serial compilation undertaken as

documentary-style observation (Fréger, Bazin) or a photographic approach that could be

described as “objective” (Graham, Streuli, Knorr) but it can also translate into the

reconstruction of images or mises en scènes aiming to reproduce archetype (s) by evocation

(Fullerton-Batten, Knorr, Bourouissa, Sank, Darzacq, Lafontaine).

And finally, after extensive research and accumulation of works based on this practice that

could be seen as formalized, even formatted on one hand and “neo…” or out of date on the

other, we realize the extensive variety of contemporary possibilities and the impossibility of

visual uniformity that we could have initially expected. This project has thus become a

presentation of diverse practices, photographic as well as film, because it has become

necessary to expand the subject to include moving image: recording a slice of life (Streuli,

Darzacq, Mul) or cinematographic (Boon).

This exhibition no longer seeks to present a formalized genre but rather to demonstrate its fragmentation.

We could quickly go over the importance of this very old genre whose contemporary reactivation

can be seen in terms of historical continuity, first that of a pictorial tradition – court

portraits which gave rise to the 19th century taste for bourgeois portraits – followed later by

the appearance of the medium of photography for popular and social portraits of families or

groups – such as class or cooperative photos. Finally, in its modern phase, the “Sandersstyle”

serial portrait appears, in which the individual becomes the representative of a social

group. This is still of major importance in the renewal of contemporary practice.

For the sake of coherence in the exhibition, we decided to focus on a generational

phenomenon: portraits of teenagers from different socio-economic groups reflecting the past

twenty years. This is a preoccupation shared by many artists. Some of the most

representative undertakings are presented here.

Yet here again, we will perceive certain impossibilities including the major difficulty of

freezing faces mid-development. And while all the artists approach the intimate fragility of

adolescence in their own way, none could possibly establish a generic portrait.

De facto, a teenage face eludes. Its physical incompleteness dooms to failure the identity

portrait and immediately brings us back to the uncertain evolution of the individual. By

definition, it can only be a temporary portrait.

These portraits are even more transitory because they escape any real class categorization.

Visual accumulation reveals that teenagers’ often-mimetic attitude does not come so much

from a real group as from the desire to become, the idea of a future whose framework

ultimately remains vague.

As a result, the subject is a delicate or even thorny one because it crosses all social classes

and sparks identity issues that combine context and emerging personality born as much of a

whimsical desire to identify with something as of a reinterpreted, caricatured reality to create

a sense of belonging.

These generational groups ultimately hold together more by an imagined link than by the

weft of real social fabric and their often hard-line yet blurry-edged attitudes echo the identity

crisis of adult society. A sort of stacking up of desires in which the individual sees himself in

the fragility of each face but in which the archetype of the group only functions by attribute.

Christine Ollier

Thanks to: Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France / Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, UK / Ron

Pôle Image Haute-Normandie, Rouen, France / Galerie VU, Paris, France