Close-ups

The series Close-ups focuses on a fragment of the face – the forehead. The drawings present enlarged views in which attention is directed toward the structure of the skin and the network of wrinkles. Instead of a full portrait, only a fragment appears, which in magnification begins to function almost like an autonomous landscape.

The wrinkles of the forehead become a record of tensions, emotions, and the passage of time inscribed in the human face. Lines of the skin, usually unnoticed in everyday perception, reveal in close view their graphic structure, resembling a kind of topography or a trace of gesture.

A distant point of reference for this series is also the historical curiosity of metoposcopy – a now forgotten pseudo-scientific practice that attempted to interpret a person’s character on the basis of the arrangement of wrinkles on the forehead. In this context the reference appears more as an ironic digression than a serious method of interpretation.

The drawings therefore do not attempt to “read” a person in any literal sense. Rather, they explore the image of the skin itself – the moment when a fragment of the face ceases to function merely as physiognomy and begins to exist as an autonomous visual form.