Álvaro Lapa

Voici nos Acteurs belongs to the series of works entitled Auto-auto-retratos [Self-self-portraits], made between 1971 and 1972. Lapa notes that this project deals with the representation of the artist’s own body as image and sensation, rather than as subjected to the arbitrariness of social conventions of bodily representation. This is the last and the most finished of a particular group of self-self-portraits, of a series of faces, formally influenced by the work of Michaux. Of all of this Belgian artist’s works, Lapa liked best the “heads”, watercolour representations of the artist himself. Whether masked or featureless, each is “a face that has not yet found its countenance”. Lapa’s image emerges from the organisation of forms, marks and colours, with an inscription in the artist’s own hand on the left side of the canvas, from the book Nova Express (1964) by William Burroughs, whence also the title of this painting. Lapa has observed that this is a representation of the custodial face of Burroughs, a painter-writer whom he considered a role model. This empty face suggests, then, the double representing the subject himself; not a “portrait”, but a possible distorted vision of the self.

AS