“Facemotions” is a collection of portraits with a focus made on the representation of someone’s feeling onto the skin. We can be nourished or destroyed by feelings. If we hide inner wounds, the opacity of our skin make it invisible to the eye. Yet, in time, whatever happens to us slowly sculpts our face. Like the rock’s erosion by the sea waves, the impacts of our feelings and their repetitive occurrence change our features. A face is an offering, an enigma, singular and irreplaceable. This is primarily why I am so drawn to representing faces and feelings. I am also fascinated by the uniqueness and difference of morphology and its connections to our human experience. Here are a collection of portraits of people who volunteered to my "Facemotions" portrait sessions where I combined a painting used as backdrop, their selves, an emotion onto their skin and a capture with the camera.
Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology of perception is of great influence in my work. Because of his focus on the essence, because this idea that "all consciousness is perceptual consciousness". By focusing on emotions, I point at the fact that the body is the primary site of knowing the world, which goes against the Western tradition of putting consciousness as the source of knowledge. The combination of of abstract and figurative creates an atmosphere that represents a moment in time, intense in color yet intimate because there is nothing else in the frame. It is all about the instant.
My role as an artist is to challenge the notion of beauty and bring to light what I consider to be beautiful in all of us. There is no canon of beauty once focused on what it entails to just be. We are perfect in our differences, because we all have different experiences of life. I chose to start this artwork with people who suffer from Vitiligo because it was very inspirational for me and because I have an inclination to care for people who suffer from social exclusion. There is a big need for advocacy and awareness for this skin disease. Art is a healing tool. I see someone with Vitiligo as a person with a landscape for an emotion to be expressed, an incredible opportunity to reveal people’s beauty with, despite, beyond Vitiligo. But my Facemotions are not just for people with Vitiligo. It is for anyone, everyone. Everyone has a strong emotion in hiding, in need to come out. It doesn’t need to be extreme to be of interest to me.
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