“Self-portrait” by Yannick Vu

The painter, having only his own reflection as a model, is inclined to find resemblances as long as the result appears to correspond to an inner requirement.

His family and friends generally do not share his opinion and are distressed by the image he has of himself. Is he really that sad? And this fixed gaze, what is it looking for beyond the looking glass? Most often they deny his projection, sometimes they go so far as to worry or almost become irritated.

Some, on the other hand, immediately recognize the friend expressed in a few signs, synthesized in a lucky gesture. They are rarer because they are more attentive.
But he, the painter, what was he thinking during this exercise and why did he do it? What made him sit down in front of the mirror one morning?

Meet his image which soon resembles a mask; identify reality behind the curve of a nose, the furrow of a wrinkle, the fold of an eyelid; undertake the systematic and uncompromising investigation of the bodily signs that define him; discover that between perception and translation intervenes the betrayal of the hand which gives him this other face – that of a brother or sister never born – strangely close, surprisingly distant, almost similar but completely unrecognizable .

What is at first an exercise of approach, quickly turns into an obsession and like a blind man groping around, he searches for his own features, constantly starting over again the exhausting lines that should express him. Dark and unforeseen path where it is the hand that invents the light leading him towards himself.

Yannick Vu
Mallorca July 2, 1985
In catalogue, El Retrato, Galerie Privat, Palma de Mallorca 1985