Some fascinating full-face 80 portraits loaned by several foreign museums are being exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel until September 12th 1999. Viewers have been confronted with each portrait which seems to look intensively at them during this rare exhibition regrouping works by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Max Beckmann, Giacometti, Bacon, Boltanski, Warhol, Chuck Close or Dubuffet while the "Echtseit GmbH" concept founded by Swiss architect Edouard Bannwart is showing man in a virtual urbanism via computers.
Called "Virtualhead", this work appears to be quite a complex installation with a Futuristic computers and armchair enabling the spectator to see his destructured face on a holographic screen before it forms its double.
Quite fascinating are also the seven triptychs and four portraits of Pope Innocent X by Bacon and one finally comes to doubt whether the invention of photography really caused a fast decline of portrait painting when placed in front of Gauguin's last dramatic like selfportrait.
Cézanne's selfportrait seems less gloomy or at least much more welcoming though the artist represented himself in a strange way looking aside like a child who had behaved badly. Dubuffet appears more expressive and funny with his portrait of Paul Léautaud on a chair (1946) or those of Antonin Artaud or Francis Ponge which look rather mythical as they are strangely reminiscent of those of the main characters of Italian comedy plays of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Matisse seemed in his own way interested in the very features of his sitters while Rosemarie Trockel's "beauty" faces offer the particularity of having been retouched by way of a computer, a process which makes them so symetric that staring at them becomes suddenly unbearable.
Meanwhile, Giacometti's main objective was to catch the curve of the eye which, in his view, was then leading him to capture all the features of a human face.
Overall the exhibition, which appears quite moving and stunning, appears to be a tremendous success and one must hope that such experiment will be renewed elsewhere in Europe or in the U.S simply because viewers will get an incredible opportunity to watch and discover portraits as they never did before.
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