Marisa Portolese
"Marisa Portolese" by Isa Tousignant, Summer 2007, p. 95
The sleep specialist Dr. James A. Rowley posited in 2005 that insomnia is a manifestation of hyper-arousal. That itself is defined as a state in which people feel things more sensitively than others, startle easily, react intensely. One look at Marisa Portolese’s latest exhibition of photographs, “Breathless,” makes Dr. Rowley seem awfully wise.
“I’m an insomniac,” Portolese admits, standing amid her early-winter show at Montreal’s Galerie Trois Points. “This is personal, it has nothing to do with the work, but I am. You know how at night things get twisted in your mind? You go to bed and get up in the morning and it’s a whole other thought—I didn’t want to ignore that experience or the thoughts that go through my mind in those times.”
After the critically acclaimed, highly lyrical photographic series she produced in 2005, Recognitions, Portolese took an unusually long break. From the subtext of our conversation, I gather that this seems to have unnerved the usually prolific artist. She repeats often that she found herself thinking and musing for an inordinately long time before moving on to the production phase of the work that became “Breathless.” Her aim with these new photographs, atypically for an artist who has up to now worked with much more tangible themes, was to capture people’s interior worlds.
Just under half of the works in the series are still lifes, a new development designed to contrast with the other half: portraits of women caught in a moment of reflection. It is an interesting and welcome addition to Portolese’s vocabulary, this psychological charge—hitherto her clever concepts and seductive sets have tended to inscribe her models’ individualisms externally.
Of course, the private and the public still merge in every portrait here, since they are directed; the artist’s subjects are not alone and caught in a contemplative moment, since she is there with them, immortalizing their image. But that makes Portolese’s goal that much more ambitious. How can one truly capture another’s solitude?
The magnificent, immense Eclipse is the most accomplished result of this impossible exercise. The backlit portrait of a woman sitting on a chair before a window shrouds its subject in an intriguing personal darkness. The image’s emotional weight is striking considering the figure’s facial features are barely perceptible. It is as if, from her shadow, the subject coaxes us to see the world through our own mind’s eye.
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