SOME IMPORTANT PEOPLE & FRIENDS
IN COLLABORATION WITH NATALIA BLANCO
BERLIN, 2010
About “Some important people & Friends”
A series of portraits Natalia Blanco has been working since 2008, made up of almost 150 different drawings. The portraits are done with the will to perpetuate a remembrance, whether it is personal or social, i.e. to show the world the image of the person in the portrait because of the importance he/she has in a certain sphere. Natalia Blanco bases upon this characteristic to title her series and to break with the supposed aim of the portrait. It is a game between fiction and reality: the spectators judge the people they see and the story they read on the assumption that they are real but, actually, any resemblance with reality is pure coincidence.
The Project
Daily, during the Offensichtlich Öffentlich exhibition, one portrait and one text are being placed like street posters on the wall. As a result of this performance, the drawings can stay or not, getting mixed with the rest of the elements that compose the urban landscape of Berlin.
In the form of fake biographies of people living in Berlin, the texts written by Betiana Bellofatto refer different aspects of the people represented in the portraits. It is the paradox of portraying someone that does not exist even though it is a mean to show someone’s physical characteristics, personality, morality and even his/her mood. These drawings show those characteristics and that is why we can face them: we analyze their physiognomies, gestures and defects, and they appear to us as familiar in a sinister way.
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