Is It You?: Faceless Painted Portraits by Fabio La Fauci.

‘Untitled Playing With Red’.

‘Again? Really?’.

‘United Talking To A Red Sign’.

‘Is It You? N.12’.

‘United Sitting On The Armchair’.

Italian born, Berlin-based artist Fabio La Fauci‘s most recent work is a set of ten portraits, where each face has been masked by a thick, sculpted layer of ceramic and acrylic modelling paste. Titled Is It You? the series follows Fabio’s taste for surrealism and abstraction, ambiguity and transformation, and the passage from one form to another form. Is It You? hints at our own disconnectedness in a world saturated with images; our curiosity and need for recognition veiled in an additional level of complexity and frightening disorientation.

In each portrait, the figures are clearly human in classic portraiture poses—arms folded, looking over a shoulder, sitting on an armchair, or turned towards a distant point. Some are caught in more fluid motion, making hand gestures or standing at ease with hands on hips. Though the centre point of their humanness or emotion, the eyes and all the subtleties and nuances of individual facial expression, have been cloaked in fleshy pink and dense slathers unmixed blood red and white. The head has become a mask and a mystification of reality.

Fabio’s acrylic paste has been rounded perfectly into the shape of a face—so while it is irregular and disarming, each portrait remains rigorous in its composition and form, creating an intriguing tension between organic figurative shapes and abstract geometry, and between reality and perplexity.

‘Is It You? N.10’.

‘United In Pink With Something On The Shoulder’.

‘Is It You? N.2’.

‘Is It You? Trypitch’.

[Images courtesy of Fabio La Fauci.]