da projecção à incorporação da máscara

Tese de mestrado em Pintura (variante I) apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Belas Artes, 2006The present dissertation is integrated in the 1st Part (theoretical-practical) of the Master’s Degree in Painting. Throughout this work, we intend to identify the main presuppositions and conventions, original, renewed or new that presided and still preside over the portrait, while practice and result, as well as over its relationship with the individual, particularly in the framework of contemporaneousness, focusing on issues that involve the training and dilution of identity, its external projection and, thus, the binomials appearance/essence, body/soul. At the same time, we intend to outline the path that, in our perspective, the human need of portrait might have gone through by establishing a parallelism between the path made through knowledge towards the human interior (physical and psychological). In this context, we devote special attention to the: platonic mimesis, noted as a danger in the progress towards knowledge; to the pursue of the objective translation of the idealized reality carried out by the Renaissance man, culminating in the mannerist deformation and in the Baroque trompe l’oeil; to the cultural revolution and the representative practices induced by the Industrial Revolution and, specially, by the invention of photograph; to the reach and to the factors, tools and heritage utilized and manipulated by the contemporary portrait, here considering two distinct aspects that, nonetheless, have similar ways of functioning: 1) The “manipulative portrait,” taken as a paradigmatic example, in the manipulation of the contemporary individual, the portrait at the service of advertising; and 2) The “Denounce-Portrait” of an artistic context that expands itself into a portrait literally incorporated by the person being portrayed, thus announcing the future body. Based on these aspects, we intend to identify the degree in which the sustentation of the human need of portrait can be previewed in a near future, legitimizing the survival of its practice or, in contrast, eliminating it. Meaning that we intend to verify to what degree the portrait “lives” or “kills” among living and “dead” (dormant) or if, ultimately, merging itself with the future man, it brings about the extinction of its need and, thus, its own deat