There was an old collector who had placed the self-portraits of all the artists he loved in his entrance hall. He wanted to meet their gaze immediately, without anxiety or compromise. He wanted to look them in the eye upon his return, to understand something more, to fully embrace his obsession. A painting is never finished being deciphered. Every moment seems to offer you a new sensation. You often discover a trace of blue that you hadn't seen or the intensity of a contrast that you hadn't grasped, a sudden, unexpected light in its background. There have been painters obsessed with their portrait. They repurposed themselves in every way. With a tuba or without one, with a moustache or a beard, with a cigarette or a pipe. As if everything could change from a simple detail. What changes is the interpretation of the observer. Perhaps it is also linked to your state of mind, to the desire you have to look at yourself by reflecting it in works that become, day after day, your mirror. We scrutinize each other, with mutual suspicion, symmetrically ready to grasp every secret of that soul. Knowing this emotion could end immediately, perhaps with the simple movement of a nail. A self-portrait, after all, especially if framed in the schemes of the 1900s, is always a special painting. The artist creates it, perhaps unconsciously, to live his moment of immortality, to propose himself with his doubts, his anxieties and vanity. He is not sure in whose hands he will end up, maybe it will be his family that will keep that precious relic, or a collector who loves his paintings. But he knows that, in this small space, he must transfer himself entirely, without masks, filters, or pretenses. As he tries to confine his anxieties, defeats and contrasting moods in the canvas by blending and mixing colors to experiment again. Nothing, in my opinion, leaves a painter more exhausted. Landscapes and portraits, in some ways, are pure photography, in any case a vision of reality. A self-portrait is not, it is a painting on which he pours all of himself without boundaries or limits, as he ends up exhausted next to his easel and must now try to face the footprints of a new path.
