These Masked Portraits Are an Instagram Sensation
The pandemic has sent masks’ cachet skyrocketing: From surgical specimens of humble pedigree they’ve become heroes in our fight against the coronavirus. But masks have always been vectors of meaning.
Self-representation has always been a fertile creative territory for artists, portraiture being a visual medium that has most directly expressed concepts of identity, emotional individuality, gender, and social status—issues around which today’s conversations gravitate and which are also obliquely yet imaginatively addressed in the work of the German painter Volker Hermes.
Hermes’s visual manipulations of famous Old Masters paintings, which he humorously morphs into masked portraits, have become Instagram sensations. His series of photo-collaged images, “Hidden Portraits,” is the subject of an exhibition at the Castello Visconteo in Pavia, a charming small town in Northern Italy. Though the exhibition was forced to close when the country’s second lockdown began, there’s still a chance to pay a visit, if and when restrictions are lifted. It officially runs until January 6, 2021.
On a Zoom call from his studio in Düsseldorf, Hermes talked about his “conversations” with Rembrandt, Van Eyck, and the whole Old Masters’ lot; the role that art can play in times of crisis; and, obviously, the utmost importance of wearing a damn mask.
It goes without saying that your masked portraits are utterly apropos in this moment. When and why did you start working on such significant representations?
The whole project started 10 years ago. At some point I started thinking about the social context of paintings. This research led me to delve deeper into the meaning of portraits, what function they have in representing the self, which kind of people were able to have their portraits taken in history. And what I amazingly discovered is that you don’t know that much about the people painted in those portraits, and we don’t know the codes of fashion and the meaning of the clothes they’re wearing as symbols of self-representation and social status at that time. When we look at a portrait, what is in focus is actually just the face—when we go to museums and we see all those beautifully dressed portraits by Old Masters, we don’t really pay much attention to their elaborate clothes, full of incredibly telling details about the society they were living in—we just look at their faces. So I thought: if I cover the face, I somehow block the focus on the emotions expressed by the face, which somehow obfuscate the perception of the rest of the image. There’s so much information and knowledge in those portraits: what they hold in their hands for instance, or some exquisite detail that you don’t really register as meaningful. So I started to cover their faces at the beginning in quite a naïve way, and for many years it stayed as a side project as I continued my work as a painter. Then over the years I realized how shifting the focus and covering the faces was an important point of view, it somehow resonated with a contemporary perspective and I started to layer codes of our times over the codes of ancient times. Then the pandemic came and obviously masking our faces is an everyday issue now. So all of a sudden my work became of interest—then Instagram came across it and made it known to a wider audience.
So, by covering the faces you shifted the attention to how the subjects were dressed and how fashion conveys deep meanings.
Absolutely. The focus on fashion is an essential part of my work on these Old Master portraits, which were actually portraying not regular people but an élite. These portraits were hugely expensive at that time, they could be afforded only by extremely wealthy commissioners, who obviously wanted to be seen as powerful and influential and affluent; their clothes were important in expressing their status and the effect and reactions they wanted to elicit from the audience. Having a portrait taken was a totally celebratory act of self-representation. But we don’t know exactly what the dressing codes in those times actually meant. If today we go to the bakery and we see a fabulous woman dressed in head-to-toe Chanel, we know what’s going on, don’t we? We know the codes, we’re able to read the message she’s sending out. The way the symbolic weight of fashion played out in those times was probably the same. Fashion has always been essential in self-definition in all times in history.
Covering our faces has become a gesture of necessity, yet it has a visual impact, not only a physical one. Masks are definitely a revealing new tool of self-representation, which is what fashion is all about.
Masks convey many different meanings and reactions, as we know well enough. In my portraits, which are photo-collages elaborated via a self-taught photoshop process on existing images, I try to see masks under a humorous light, even if obviously the situation is all but humorous. I try to add a fashionable element, a bit of a relieving touch, so to speak. I try to make them seem beautiful and not threatening. I work on exaggerating details of the costumes worn by the subjects in the portraits, which leads to reading the image as slightly bizarre and ironic and funny, with an over-the-top quality that makes the meaning of the masked face less dramatic or threatening. They’re seen through our contemporary eyes, as a maximalist, visually charged take on historical codes. I never add any extra element to the pictures, I just work digitally manipulating the pictorial elements already present in them. These are amazing pieces of art that I deeply respect. I don’t want in any way to belittle their invaluable place in art history, quite the contrary. I don’t want to add a mobile phone or a joint or something nonsensical into the picture! I try to elaborate them in a way that’s plausible and that fits without distorting their beauty. I’d like them to look like an original. It’s my way of expressing my respect to this wonderful art.
When I came across your work, which was some time ago, I was puzzled. Knowing art history quite well, I asked myself how have I never seen this portrait before? In which museum is it exhibited? I thought they were original paintings. Your manipulations are realistic to a fault.