SELFRIDA, appearances are deceiving

Engraving exhibition in collaboration with the Municipal School of Art and Design Illa de Sabadell

“Appearances are deceptive” is a proverb attributed to Molière that Frida Kahlo wrote under a drawing. It was her first self-portrait, not discovered until this 21st century, the era of appearances. She who dressed to cover her mutilated body, portrays herself impassive in a transparent dress that, like an X-ray, reveals her body. We find ourselves before a naked woman dressed. When Venus replaces the Virgin in the Renaissance, the female nude, previously considered sinful, will not represent sensual pleasure so much as it will be filled with high values and will be interpreted based on a metaphysical concept related to “truth”. Therefore, the act of covering nudity would mark an operation of repression, the lie would be the dress…; and in fact the clothing of this period will be the pure representation of falsehood and deformation of the body.

The ritual of reinterpreting herself day after day through clothing was for Frida, more than a way of camouflaging her wounds, a vindication of her ideology, of her indigenous part and a questioning of her gender identity, beyond the stereotypes marked by the misogynistic world in which she lived. The dress becomes a mask, but in her drawing Frida also wants to show us what remains covered. The self-portrait is a creation between the way we want others to look at us and our own inner gaze, which describes the drama of our life in tension with internal emotions, which we cannot always express as we wish. But not everyone masters the tools of representation, so for a long time the plastic interpretation of one's own image remained in the hands of an exclusive minority, the artist.

Currently, the vast majority of people connected have rewritten the history of the self-portrait, turning the selfie into the first visual signature of the new era. The selfie gives us control and at the same time frees us, it plays with what we can see, hiding what we can't, but that we know is there because otherwise we wouldn't hide it. Let's vent, like Frida, our ills, to give them the option to heal us, because art offers us a possibility to do so!