RONALD DE SOUSA

RONALD DE SOUSA
oil on Belgian linen
cm 30 x 40
2012

OF PORTRAITS AND TIME
For Luca Del Baldo

"The great neurologist Eric Kandel, commenting on his book on the neuroscience of art, was recently quoted as saying: “ portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like a dangerous animal at a distance – both perceived and felt.” Indeed, they may be dangerous in different ways for painter, viewer and sitter. The last time I had my portrait painted, I was 11 years old, and sitting for a portrait felt as demanding as sitting through a piano lesson, where self-presentation was equally important (“I'll overlook wrong notes or dirty fingernails,” my teacher warned, “but not both!”). Inevitably, it brings out a sitter's narcissism. At my age, however, as Michel Leiris once pointed out, the danger of narcissism tkes the form of a fascination with every sign of encroaching decrepitude. That is one way that portraits are all about time. (For me, perhaps this is beacause if I haven't given a thought to time and death in the last day, I feel a slight pang of guilt, as if I had been culpably oblivious of a lover.) But that is not the only way portraits are about time. For the painter the danger is that the istant captured is only a lifeless instant. The brain is cunningly fashioned to interpret a two dimensional array as representing three-dimensional space. Natural selection angineered that: but only art, and never nature, can have trained us to apprehend a perfectly still image as representing a life that exists in time. The best portraits suggest not stillness but transition, between the previous and the next unseen moment. By doing that, a good portrait also meets another, more insidious challange: in its stillness, a portrait aspires to be the way someone looks: time in its fullness frozen in an istant, in the sense captured by Mallarme's famous line in his “Tombeau d'Edgar Allan Poe”: Tel qu'en lui-meme enfin l'eternité le change. But no viewer wants to see, frozen for eternity, merely aninstant in a person's life – and no sitter wants to be so limited. Despite the captivating character of Nietzsche's thought experiment about Eternal Recurrence (or Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life), it is not beacuse of tedium of repetition that the prospect seems horrific – for recurrence, unlike repetition, will be new every time. It is rather beacause the love of life is teh love of its ephemeral dynamism.
Luca meets all those challanges of temporality, by choosing an instant that is not an istant, but the suggestion of a transition, of dynamic process. He has me about to speak, while a the same time hesitating about what to say, or about whether it is worth saying, or perhaps worryng whether my interlocutor wants to hear it. In other words, by showing so vividly a moment of trasitional thought, he has conspired to let his subject escape time, by fixing him in time, just so."
RONNIE DE SOUSA,
April, 2012
(copyrigts by Ronnie de Sousa. All rights reserved)