The Self-Portrait as a Metaphor for Identity
Self-portraits, in general, dating back to Ancient Egypt, to the Amarna period (1365 BC), fulfilling a double function: marking the work as their own and as a self-representation. However, portraiture did not become a sub-genre of painting in the West until the s. XIV.
At the end of the Renaissance, in a new artistic context of renewal and rupture with antiquity, the artist began to discreetly include himself in his works to imply that being a painter is not a mere mechanical job. From this time on, the central motif of the self-portrait is the gaze. This works as an intermediary between the art object and the viewer. The artist seeks to “aristocratize” his image, adding symbolic attributes to ennoble his art. An example of this is Dürer.
Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Yair Shoshani feels capable of drawing everything, but he has specialized mainly in landscape and portraits. He defines his work as ‘realistic art’. Yair stands out for his pencil drawings and portraits, where black and white results predominate. Bellow, gives us his insight into self-portraits and explains why they are critical to our understanding of both portraiture and the history of art.
Starting from the etymological meaning of the term portrait, which comes from the Latin retracts, a participle of the verb retrahere, which means to turn something into something else by bringing it back to light, making it revive, an investigation begins that focuses its analysis on how the artist is observed, internally and externally. It transforms and reappears converted into something different, something that helps it in some way, either therapeutically or psychologically, proposing existential narratives open to its interpretation to the viewer.
The self-portrait is the creation of a work, be it photography, painting, drawing, or sculpture, in which the artist represents his own image, and also the symbolic or metaphorical self-portrait that comes from of the intimate diary, and through which the artist tries to order his emotions. Therefore, Yair Shoshani considers that the self-portrait is not only a physical representation of the artist but any projection of the internal conflicts that the artist represents in his work, such as otherness or double, returning to the etymological origin; to bring out again, to revive the self, to project something new, elaborated from within. Through the self-portrait, as a form of self-knowledge, the artist is able to face his fears, and express the purest and irrational emotions, in order to transcend the reality that he faces.
