Framing portraits, and memory

ARTWALK

FOR MOST OF us, the digital camera has altered the meaning of portraits forever. It's often a friend photographed, often off-guard. And if everyone agrees, an unflattering portrait can be deleted and replaced. Scratching the mind a little, the other memory is of the kind of stuff Raja Ravi Varma's oils were all about.

The Grand Portrait, the subject presenting himself. Even the idyllic rural India oils so common in Indian living rooms valourise their subjects. A doe-eyed woman in a village, epitomisng innocence.

With the exception of some of the work of Bharti Kher from two years ago and Anju Dodiya's work from even before that, there is little other stimulating portraiture these days at home. Not surprising, since portraits are not what our most vibrant artists create.

Sometimes, however, portraits can work as an unlikely entry point into exploring identity in fresh and often gripping ways. The show at Washington's National Portrait Gallery showcases a few such cases in a small, taut exhibition, with five rooms full of works, each room devoted to the work of one artist. There is Portraiture Now: Framing Memory: it comprises painting and one artist who quilts.

I find Alfredo Arreguin among the most arresting, because of his use of a mosaic surface, by which he builds up a person from hundreds of collected fragments. Each fragment is essentially a traditional tile-like design, saturated in colour.

Optically, there is no complete resolution here, as the images created from these bits are always clouded over, so to say. Arreguin's paintings of Frida Kahlo uses this technique with power. As a Mexican, he holds Kahlo up as his national hero, so to say. One of his best is where Kahlo and Diego Riviera pose formally.

Diego is sitting, occupying the central position, and Kahlo is standing. But you notice Kahlo first because on their wall, behind the couple, hangs a portrait of Kahlo, underscoring her presence. It is as if the tiles themselves, symbolic of Mexico, build upto Kalho, who, in turn, embodies Mexico through her amorphous image.

Brett Cook, who has worked with public imagination and in public spaces frequently, invites dialogue, even when the viewer is a quiet observer, for he paints on box mirrors. Instead of a flat painting, these structures become like columns and mantle places.

With the result, the structure of the works creates an iconic feel to the subjects of Cook's portraits "" union leader Caesar Chavez, for example. When you look at Chavez (in one case), you catch traces of yourself in the mirror. You are part of the portrait for a moment, inside and outside a work of art at the same time. At that point the work becomes complete. Cook seems to say that the portrait is what the viewer adds to the image.

And there is Tina Mion, whose portraits of Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy (picture above) are not as seamless and smooth as they appear to be. Each woman has at her heart her powerful husband, and is tied to them in complex ways. Jackie Kennedy's King of Hearts playing card, which she holds close to her heart, is torn by a bullet. Mion shows her wearing that famous pink suit. There is a hard-to-define tragic shadow cast over.

Such portraits then hope to be able to simultaneously make sense of the memory and the person, all on one bounded surface. This leaves space for critical thinking which the artists fill in with their perspectives.

These older genres are sharp political commentary and a hard look at the person, a frightening picture to be in. These portraits are not about how you look. They are about what you look like.