Masks

Meira Porath continues her pictorial study of blending identities and complexions, memories and countenances, to the point of obscuring the borderline between the authentic and the fictional, highbrow and lowbrow, the important and the trivial.

Porath invites her viewer to dwell into the illusory depths of the scene in which the works’ theatricality is suddenly exposed to doubt; a moment in the spectacle when pretence and the mimetic dimension stand at the center of attention. She observes reality in a manner that seeks to disassemble it back to the constitutive elements of the image, while simultaneously re-assembling them to form a personal, reflective system – which formulates the individual’s position in a complex and changing world.

The works are in dialogue with the tradition of Italian Commedia dell’arte, as well as with other theatrical and carnival traditions of role plays and role exchanges. She presents a series of fictional portraits, weaving countenances and scenes, mixing cultures and gazes, autobiography and collective memory.

Porath’s works combine macabre humor with profound sadness, conjuring enigmas and evoking the sense that each brushstroke deletes the one that precedes it. In her artistic universe, every step forward is one step closer to uncertainty.