Tamar Bresge

The Roses In My My Closet (Installation)

On my baby Grand Tour, in August of 2018, by celestial serendipity, I met a French portrait painter, who trained and practices in Florence. His offer to paint my portrait was the catalyst of my ongoing practice - commissioning this single person to paint my own self-portraits. Outsourcing the physical action of painting, to procure an unknowable insight into my ‘self’. Looking, for a considerable time, at these portraits, to excavate truths and fictions of how I am seen, only accessible through the filter of another’s brush. Picking at the wound of an inevitable exchange of gaze between myself and my painter, buying his attention (but not his affection). And at the centre of all this exchange of looking and likeness, writing.Writing, to write myself in and out of liking him. Writing, to feel the friction of the lost location of my sacred, painted world. Writing, to pour myself into the poetic space of my paintings that I did not paint, so porous beyond their superficial planes of landlocked girls who look like me. Writing myself into poetry.In performance and installation, I play with the privileges of looking and limitations of seeing, and the difference between vision and sight (I have a degenerative eye disease, which is tangled and tethered to this obsessive practice of needing to be seen). And I write my way through all this seeing and being.