→ SELF-PORTRAITS
Self-portrait as a contractor,
acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Raph-rent, (Raphael/Laurent)
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 130 cm,
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as the Mc Donald bride,
acrylic on canvas, 230 cm x 110 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait with rasor and camera,
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as the Team Roket,
acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 150 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as gang leader with 101 dalmatians headband, 2001,
acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Laurent La Gamba, Self-portrait with camera and brush
acrylic on canvas, 2001, 200 x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Laurent La Gamba, Self-portrait as a portion of french fries,
acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 160 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait with Ray Ban sunglasses,
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 140 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as a sneaker gluer,
acrylic on canvas, 100 x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait with brush and cigarette,
acrylic on canvas
200 x 120 cm
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait, acrylic on canvas
acrylic on canvas
200 x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Can't you shave, acrylic on canvas,
130 x 130 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as a Air France Stewardess,
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
Self-portrait as a Pokemon,
acrylic on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
© Laurent La Gamba
2001
"Laurent La Gamba undertakes a series of self-portraits, where cigarette dangling from his mouth, his face painted in a photorealist fashion he morphs into a stewardess, a Mc Donald's manager, Bob the Builder or a veiled woman. The focus is on the face, the background and accessories are painted with haste."
'The main influence I received from Lacan's "Purloined Letter" in which the sentence: “The style is the man himself” is replaced by “The style is the man we are talking/turning to…”, meaning that the ego is like an empty skin and needs to be filled by the echo received from the message sent to the others. This answer is sometimes given by the appearance of the person and the ego’s development is aligned with the level of the other’s desire. My self-portraits try to visualize the phenomenon of the echo-process. The object of the gaze, is playing his part as this sexual travesty through masquerade (make-up) what we didn't acknowledge was Lacan's reference to display. The masquerade (the “mask-erade”) takes place in the symbolic register. The reflective surface of the self-portrait’s eye is a kind of metaphorical way of invoking the reflection of the spectator's gaze calling up the notion of the mirror phase. I am playing with consumer emblems and marketing patterns (the Disneyland patterns for example) to draw a ironical point of identification with the character photographed.
The self-portrait genre is an instrument, a medium, a rhetoric, delivering a compete range of self- representation. It’s a shift.' Laurent La Gamba
YOUR ART BOOKS...
Laurent La Gamba,
Works on canvas - Portraits and Self-portraits (1998 - 2001)
80 pages
ISBN: 978-1500758356
Artist Laurent La Gamba tries to explore the subversive potential of consumer society to produce satirical canvases. It’s a symbiosis of precarious ego fictions and pictorial discovery of he fundamental instability of self. The artist is playing with consumer emblems and marketing to draw an ironical point of identification with the character photographed. For the artist the self-portrait genre is an instrument, delivering a complete range of self-representation. The portraits and self-portraits melodramatize and reimagine the artist's own physiognomy displaying a kind of modern existential heroism turned into absurdity or sometimes social and political criticicism. The figure as a neurotic and obsessive pattern is absolutely predominant in all his work. His interests lie in showing how identification processes can go both ways, from one extreme to the other and sometimes how different identities can coexist forsome time before a path is chosen.
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