SUR-FACE: This title embraces a series of 18 pictures by Istvan Balogh, which appear at first sight to be traditional portraits of women. The hyphen in the title draws attention to a fundamental ambiguity. As our gaze glides over the surfaces of the faces, we initially perceive an apparently classical portrait of a sitter who has posed specifically for the camera. In some of the portraits it is not easy to discern the subtle departures from customary expectations; in others the deviations are unmistakable and conspicuous. In comparing the portraits, we are forced to take a closer look at each of them. All of the women are wearing make-up, the details of which suddenly arrest the gaze. The make-up is exaggerated, carelessly outlined and asymmetrical; we see, for example, deliberately applied freckles, slightly smeared lips or lopsided eyebrow pencilling.

For the sitting, the women had agreed to apply make-up in a way that they would otherwise never do. The make-up was not applied to emphasize a positive feature or conceal a negative one, i.e., as a cosmetic reinforcement of the sitter’s self-image; it was, in fact, diametrically opposed to its conventional function. Through the subtlety of their approach – the artist had explicitly asked his subjects to avoid clownish exaggeration – the sitters’ faces were reduced to external appearances without any suggestion of an inner life. Istvan Balogh’s photographs make clear to us that they are merely coloured surfaces that depict other surfaces. The photographed image no longer has anything to do with the individual it depicts; it has acquired a reality of its own that functions autonomously.

Extract from Catalogue Text: WORLD IMAGES

Andreas Fiedler