Portraits

Marisa Portolese is an artist who has already made a name for herself in several exhibitions across the country but also in Europe and the United States. Having obtained a Master’s degree in photography at Concordia University where she teaches in the same discipline, this young photographer began a project to explore the human condition three years ago.

This project gave the Belle de jour series of thirty erotic portraits of women, oscillating between feminine interiority and voyeurism. The following year, she continues her journey with male portraits placed in nature, making echoes of the German romantic pictorial tradition. The marine panorama, the ravines, the forests, parks, gardens are the backdrops used to create images, solitary male figures that fix us intensely.

For this new series of portraits, Marisa Portolese brings together a set of characters immersed in their own enigmatic situation and their emotional landscape. The lonely character of each photograph presents a look lost in the distance or makes a subtle gesture that attempt to testify to his psychological state or to reveal a moment of intimacy. By scrutinizing his face and his expression, the artist seeks to capture his story, a story where everyone evolves in his own imagined world, experiencing his personal drama that leaves him surprisingly calm and slightly numb. The narrative expresses the complexity of self-awareness and the subtleties of model psychology. These images evoke expectation, hope, desire, failure, creation, loneliness, daydreaming and contemplation.

The exhibition entitled Portraits at Galerie Trois Points is made up of large-format color photographs that unveil part of this series.

The artist wishes to thank the Conseil des Arts du Québec and the Conseil des Arts of Canada for their support.

Press release