“The Age of the Face”—Why does contemporary art keep depicting the “human face”?
This has been true for a long time in contemporary art museums, illustrations on social media, and product advertisements, but sometimes a strange sensation arises.
From among the works displayed on the wall, a human face looks back at me. What is depicted there is not a magnificent landscape or a scene from history, but simply the face of one human being, existing across the entire screen.
Why do modern expressionists, primarily painters, continue to depict the “face” to such an extent? Not all contemporary art is portraiture, but in recent paintings, the motif of the face seems to have a stronger presence than ever before.
I thought that in the background of this, there might be a change in the very way “we look at humans.”
—
In the past, understanding a person meant sharing time and values with the person you were facing.
Seeing each other in the neighborhood, observing how they approached their work, and knowing their seasonal behavior and how they interacted with others was how we engaged with ourselves and others.
Through the accumulation of such long periods of time, a personality—the idea that “that person is this kind of person”—was gradually formed.
However, nowadays, it is not uncommon for the first meeting with others to take place on a smartphone screen. The moment you open social media, the first thing you see is a small face photo, and you receive an initial impression from that face before you know the person’s way of thinking or living.
From just a single image, we unconsciously construct a portrait of the other person. (The human-type brain has a property of connecting known information, and it unconsciously aligns experiential memories with the image of a person met for the first time.)
In the modern age, have humans not become “beings who are instantly seen and judged” before they are “beings who are understood over time”?
If we think of it that way, I thought that the fact that painters’ themes of expression are heading toward “human face expression” might be the result of a natural “reaction/reflection” that suggestively indicates the changes of the times from a bird’s-eye view.
—
The face in contemporary art is not merely a record of a person; what is depicted is not the answer to “what kind of life has this person lived,” but rather,
“Do we think we understand humans just by their faces?”
is a question posed by the expression itself.
Have you ever had the experience of looking at the expressions of people passing by on a train and unconsciously imagining their personalities or moods?
Even though you know nothing about the other person, you create a human image from the small piece of information that is a face.
Modern portraiture seems to be projecting that very mechanism of human cognition (the brain-functional human type) onto a large screen.
In other words, what the painter was depicting was not the face itself, but “a human being understood only by their face.”
—
Why the face and not the body?
That is because the face is the part most strongly connected to and expressed by the human inner spirit (mind) compared to the body.
We have a nervous system that instantly reads vast amounts of information from a face and connects it directly to judgment, even if we are not usually conscious of it—such as when the eyes of someone saying “I’m fine” with a smile look somewhat sad, or when we sense some change in the expression of a friend we haven’t seen in a long time before it turns into words.
That is precisely why the expression of the face has never ceased to attract expressionists since ancient times.
The portraits of Diego Velázquez (Spain/1599–1660) do not stop at depicting people by emphasizing their status or ornaments. He possesses the technical skill and expressive power to leave the presence and personality of the person on the canvas.
On the other hand, Francis Bacon (UK/1909–1992) expressed the anxiety and fear inside humans by violently distorting the face on the canvas.
Although their methods were different, what the two were facing was similar. It is “the human being themselves/the true form of the human being that exists behind the face.”
—The Artist’s Second Intention
Also, I sometimes think that there might be another meaning to the giant human faces in contemporary art. The limiting conditions during viewing make that meaning stand out.
That is, when we stand in front of a large face, we naturally cannot escape the gaze on the screen.
Even though we are supposed to be looking at the work, we begin to accept the sensation of being looked at by the work before we know it.
There, a problem regarding the “gaze” in modern society emerges. This is not limited to the human gaze, but also includes “gazes” like those of “surveillance cameras.”
When the awareness that a camera is pointed at you enters your consciousness, you naturally feel compelled to change your behavior slightly.
This is because the feeling of being watched by someone makes you conscious of “looking at yourself again.”
Works with giant faces function similarly, speaking silently to us.
“How do you usually look at people?”
“You, too, are a being who is watched by us.”
At that moment, the work may not be a painting that just shows a face, but a mirror that repeats questions and answers.
—The Value of the Social “Face”
And currently, the face may be connected not only to culture but also to social value.
When looking for an acquaintance in a crowd, we look for their face before their clothing or way of walking.
On social media, too, there is a tendency for images showing people’s faces to attract more attention than text-only posts.
Did you know that it is thought that humans have developed the ability to read the state of others from their faces in the process of evolution?
Therefore, in the modern age, being seen for one’s “face” easily becomes value in itself. Art works depicting “human faces” are also born reductively within that social environment. I feel the interest in that.
—
Looking back at art history, there is no subject (theme/topic) that has remained the center forever.
In an era when religion was the center of society, people used gods or sacred beings as figures or monsters and expressed them as the subject.
At times, interest turned toward nature or light itself, leading to expressions like Impressionist painting.
And as people’s interest shifted from the concepts of God and nature to the human spirit, expressionists began to break down forms and express the human inner self through color and line.
Part of artistic expression becomes material for knowing what the people of that era are looking at.
Then, in the modern age where information is connected instantly and information overload is unavoidable, what are we looking at?
I think it is “Self” + “Ego.”
While we can access information from all over the world, the sense of “who am I” is more easily shaken than before, and when it is shaken, we seek stability.
That is why we might be confirming the contours of our own selves by borrowing the contours of others while staring at their faces.
The face may be a window for looking at others, and at the same time, by being replaced by an expressive object, the layer changes, the phase of consciousness changes, and it may become a mental mirror that looks back at oneself.
—To Next-Generation Art
Trends will change someday.
Religious paintings, landscape paintings, and abstract paintings all played major roles in their respective eras before being passed on to the next expression.
Therefore, the “Age of the Face” will also end someday.
However, that will likely not be called a decline.
This is because artistic expression is a human act of turning new gazes and questions toward things that the era has not yet noticed.
If the present is the “Age of the Face,” what will humanity look at next?
The person who first finds the contours of the next era will likely not be someone who follows trends. The person who quickly grasps changes that do not yet have names and moods that spread like fog will likely become the leading figure representing the next generation.
Art/expression is not just a technique for depicting beautiful things, but at times, it is an activity of sensing changes in the era that no one has yet put into words and quickly raising questions. I believe it is an activity of presenting that to the world as one form.
・Afterword
When the brain acquires a new concept, it naturally becomes active, and it is something that recombines, rearranges, or wears down and eliminates concepts within facts, fantasies, and all ontology.
People who repeatedly visit new religions or fortune tellers are typical of this. “Newness” destroys the “self until now.” This sensation is influenced by the brain’s emotional hormone action, but in fact, looking at it from a bird’s-eye view, I think that the person’s range of action, structure of consciousness, and thought structure for grasping meaning are not only unchanged from before, but are hardening into a more rigid structure over time.
Artistic expression, philosophy, and science that take on the role of breaking such cycles are like installing a switch on fixed thought circuits.
They break the thought cycle, allow you to change routes, cause realizations, and make you stop.
A person who provides a “function” that makes the viewer “question” the “until now.” Expressionists might be what we call such people.
Thank you for reading to the end.
m(_ _)m
May you have peace, fulfillment, and the beckoning of aesthetic consciousness.
・Related Magazines
・Membership Information
