LUCAS LICCINI, CONCEALED, ONGOING text by Peer Illner | artworks by Lucas Liccini
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The imagery of the Berlin-born and London-based photographer Lucas Liccini negotiates sensitively between different established aesthetic norms. Playing with notions of the visible and the hidden, the lucid and the obscure, his portrait series cleverly deconstructs the naturalistic concept of the portrait itself, presenting a search for identity that is filled with traps, detours and dead ends. At first glance, Liccini’s pictures, all shot in black and white film, seem straightforward. The photos show people exclusively belonging to the wider circle of friends and family of the artist, thus seemingly enabling an intimate and personal insight into the artist’s life in the traditions of Wolfgang Tillmans or the early Ryan McGinley. However, at a closer look, this superficial intimacy proves ambivalent and deceiving. When one moves closer to the portrait, focusing on its minute details, one is immediately struck by the many obscuring effects that conceal the features of the artist’s subjects, thus making them unintelligible. Eyes hide behind cigarette smoke; dark glasses conceal a girl’s face and the long hair of a young man leaves only his anonymous mouth and nose uncovered. This ambivalence asks questions about the very nature of the portrait and the naturalistic image itself. Can we believe what we see with our eyes? Does the phenomenological idea of the equivalence of perception and reality hold true? Is a person’s identity ever visible in its image? The choice of the artist’s obscuring elements, being everyday objects and commonplace phenomena like shadows, smoke, and household goods shows that the ambiguity of the image is a common uncertainty rather than a freakish exception. At the same time, Liccini asks the viewer for a contribution and urges him to participate in the artwork precisely by attempting to decipher a model’s possible identity. In the spirit of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, the artist thus creates a space for an encounter between the audience and the portrait. It is in this space of relational proximity, in the interstice between the visible and the invisible that the spectator makes contact with the picture, asking it to give an account of itself, to reveal its secret and to finally show its identity only to become aware of the profound complicity that the spectator shares with the portrait, consisting in the sheer impossibility of complete representation. It is with this recognition that the search for an identity abruptly stops, where no more questions are asked and where the viewer merely immerses himself in the play of incomplete identity, moving nomadically from symbolic surface to symbolic surface, from hair to glasses to skin until he is finally lost in a narration that is necessarily incomplete, illusionary and partly hidden. By simultaneously creating an appealing face and making it disappear, Liccini creates an aestheticised Deleuzian encounter with non-identity, with a faceless portrait that stares right back at you and charmingly smiles.
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