Effigies - Mortuary Portraits

“Every Picture is a Death’s Portrait”

“These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence – not of me.” Cindy Sherman

ef·fi·gy – noun

1. Representation (as a shadow) of a person or a personified or symbolic thing. 2. Image, portrait.Effigy is a project wich aims to personify marks, riddles, tales, tokens, allegories, spiritual and human signs through photographic portraits with interventions related to the history of the portrayed persona.

These interventions may vary from charcoal and oil paint to the own character’s urine, pieces of hair and clothes utilization, thereby transcending the image of a matter that someday will cease to be; an lengthening of life portrayed by the transfer of the “soul” throughimage.

They are mortuary portraits inspired by symbolisms, a macabre imaginary of love for life and of the will of being more, as Philippe Áries would say; and according to Hans Belting, the phenomenon of presence/absence gives the image an enigmatic facet wich is explained, partially, by the contradictory relation between the image and its support, which leads the author towards its nature of corporeal being.

Considering the origins of portrait and its uses through history we rely our work on Didi-Huberman’s theoretical studies, which proposes that the portrait has had its birth in the Paleolitic, when human skulls have been filled and adorned by the living.

Would the portrait have been paradoxically born from the void, out from a box full of holes, which is how we can view the skull and the engendered images? Its memories from a life and the materialization of its body through photography.