In this chapter I deal with the question of the reciprocal ‘Portrait’. The portrait made by one artist of another, or rather one artist’s point of view of a colleague’s work and vice versa.

On the one hand, there is what Stefano Arienti says about me in the project contained on this very site (“Stefano Arienti’s guided tour”), which resulted in the book “Contro la mediocrità” (Edizioni Pondus), and on the other there is my look at Stefano Arienti’s work in the book “Empatia” (Edizioni Pondus).

The “Stefano Arienti’s guided tour” project sprang from a heated debate Stefano and I had a while ago about my site. How can an artist represent herself? What should an artist say about herself? How much of her work should she show? How much should she leave to the imagination? How much should she say and how much should she let people intuit? What kind of words should she use? Up to what point should the artist contribute personally towards clarifying her work? How much should she leave open to interpretation? 

With these questions in mind, I decided to invite Stefano to participate in my site and, giving him total freedom, I asked him to imagine a ‘counter site’, to look at my work through his eyes, possibly even offering a critical interpretation. I invited an artist friend into my intimate space to let him express a personal view of my world. I let Stefano speak for me. I went from a self-portrait to sitting for my portrait. I went from the active position of someone who makes their own self-portrait to the passive position of someone having their portrait painted. I let myself be looked at and I let him go through and remount all of my work in order to discover a new view of myself. 

Then came the second project, thanks to another artist friend, Massimo Kaufmann, who invited Stefano and me to reciprocally curate a book about each other for his publishing series. 

Stefano has imagined a paper version of the chapter for my site. I, on the other hand, started from a position of identification in Stefano’s work and I tried to bring out all the most pictorial aspects from the enormous body of his work; those parts and those behaviours that I felt coincided with my way of thinking and seeing. 

In the end, I think that in a certain sense a self-portrait as well as a portrait was created. I would like to go even further and say that two self-portraits resulted from this game of mirrors, exchanged glances and reciprocal attention.

Basically, does not one artist portraying another also talk about herself, and about the conception of her own reality? Does not she project in her view of the other all the things that she recognises in herself? Isn’t she perhaps looking for contacts and similarities rather than differences? Isn’t she moved more by empathy than by conflict?

(Written in 2018)

Link to "Guided Tour" by Stefano Arienti