Histories of Faces: Belting Variations

According to the German art historian Hans Belting (born in 1935), the face is “the first image” and the vanishing point to which all images converge. Some of the oldest images depict faces; through them, we expose ourselves to others and establish our relational dynamics. The long, rich history of the representation of the face in the arts indicates an unceasing attempt to discover beneath this magical, animated surface “the most enthralling surface on Earth”—the human self.
Its origins are intertwined with the rigid, unfathomable image of the archaic mask and the cultic, sacred dimensions that unfold and animate it; the death mask, anchored in the urge to preserve memories; or the mask of ancient drama, infused with expressiveness and life. Its connections with the portrait are sometimes rooted in an urge for similarity, for truth, for seizing a personality or an identity, and sometimes in a will to set in motion and to conduct the performative art of transmutation.

However, despite all the attempts to capture the essence of the human being in images through drawing, sculpture, photography, painting, and cinema, the face—between the visible and the invisible, presence and withdrawal, rigidness and animation, exposure and erasure—remains a great mystery.

Taking Hans Belting's Face and Mask: A Double History as its starting point, this exhibition, conceived as a visual essay, delves into the anthropological and artistic dimensions of the face, combining a selection of works from the Berardo collections, from other national and international collections, and from different fields of knowledge. Graphic arts, archival records, scientific matters, means of communication, and works of art are all part of a thread that seeks to express—without meaning to exhaust—the visual “adventure” of faces.

From the singular to the plural, from the human “face” to its many “visages,” an itinerary is drawn—starting with the funerary rite, which Belting considers to be the origin of the image (ROOM 1).

Then, one wanders along the grammar of physiognomy, which was conceived as having the capacity to recognise the inner state of a person through their external appearance (ROOM 2: PHYSIOGNOMY AND EXPRESSION).

Next, the relationship between identification, policing, and subject is evoked with the archive and its original connection to the exercise of power and social control through the creation of a statistical register of individuals. Photography was forced upon faces that feared such technology and preferred to escape the eye of authority (ROOM 3: POLICING THE FACE).

Afterwards, one goes on to the question of the relationship between the face and the mask in the context of colonialism and the avant-garde (ROOM 4: MUTE MASKS), as well as the establishment of the portrait as an artistic genre (ROOM 5: PORTRAIT, A GENRE)—also considering the mediatic massification that tends to erase personality through a disquieting process of “becoming mass” (ROOM 6: MEDIA FACES).

Halfway through, special importance is given to the work of Jorge Molder—to whom Hans Belting dedicates a chapter in Face and Mask: A Double History—which deals with the issue of the representation of the self, between one's intimacy with and distance from oneself (ROOM 7: JORGE MOLDER).

Along with the deviation from its original political function of identification, the issue of the archive reappears in relationship with the subject matter of memory (ROOM 8: ARCHIVE, MEMORY).
In the “end,” one finds an eternal return to the expression and proliferation of faces: the impossibility of bringing the matter to closure, a vertiginous vanishing point where the face and faces perpetually resist and renew themselves, always exceeding one’s grasp (SALA 9: VANISHING POINT: GUINTCHE).

Curated by João Figueira, Katherine Sirois, Marta Mestre, Vítor Silva / Imagens Migrantes / Ymago.

Works by Francisco Tropa, Ângelo de Sousa, Dennis & Erik Oppenheim, Duchenne de Boulogne, José Loureiro, Armando Alves, Ana Mendieta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Daniel Blaufuks, Kader Attia, Soares dos Reis, Eduardo Nery, Constantin Brancuși, José de Almeida Furtado, Fernando Lemos, Santeri Tuori, Almada Negreiros, Lewis Hine, Lúcia Prancha, André Martins, Cindy Sherman, Jorge Molder, Christian Boltanski, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Hieronymus Cock, João Glama Ströberle, Giambattista della Porta, Charles Le Brun, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Charles Darwin, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Sigmund Freud, René Descartes, Cesare Lombroso, Jean-Étienne Esquirol, Franz Joseph Gall, Francis Galton, J. H. Santos David, Paul Richer, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Thomas Ruff, among others.

Histories of Faces
Belting Variations
08/05 – 15/09/2019
Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa

Image: Erik & Dennis Oppenheim, Extended Expressions (frame), 1971 (Aspen, Colorado). Video, black and white, silent, 12'. Courtesy: Dennis Oppenheim Estate.