Visages. Dominika Berger at Sala Parés.

What is a face? Portraits, as we know, hold a prominent place in Dominika Berger's painting, but above all they play a fundamental role in the reasoning of her art. Baudelaire wrote in L'art romantique: "
… a good portrait always seems to me like a dramatized biography, or rather it is like the natural drama inherent in any man". Every portrait is a form of mirror. But what portrait? Who resembles whom? Do the images resemble the models (are there models, actually?) or do the models resemble each other? Are these self-portraits?

However, picking up the thread: what can truly be seen in a painting by Dominika Berger? What is really expressed there? What is a painting, if not a visibility worked on by the invisible? Or transparency. Is the painting not the excess of the dispossessed object? Beyond this, in her work there are no abrupt changes, few twists, but many renewed intentions, searches not yet satisfied, a game of variants and variations, sometimes very subtle variations on a repeated theme, but always reinvented: the face. Where the surprise is total each time and is combined with the pleasure of hearing the theme again. But there are faces that resist or, rather, that fade, that seem to blur, as if it were a matter of not insisting on it, of signifying a culmination in the blank, "making the void" to only keep the essential. It does not grasp - by any means - neither the specificity of the human face, nor the practice of the portrait as it is shown to us through her paintings.

Portraits like these do not reassure us. We cannot expect to read evidences in them. They couldn't be recognizable, identical to their model. Ultimately, would painting not be painting to lose one's face? Would painting be scrutinizing- scrutinizing oneself? In fact, in many of her paintings, Dominika Berger treats reality as a memory from which the secret cannot emerge. This kind of interference and erasure of what is visible illustrates a fundamental aspect of her art. Double, duplicitous painting: in the same colored place, she makes the eye pass from a state of what is visible to the other, she leads it from a reality in images to a blurring of the gaze. The aesthetic experience is this dark, material and intimate relationship: a physical, immeasurable relationship that refers to the memory of the eye. And it is precisely here that we are intrigued by Dominika Berger's approach, a stripping of existence that is always active."

Emmanuel Guigon

It can be visited from Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 2 pm and from 4 pm to 8 pm.