Katinka Lampe - Instadentity

About

Three years after her last exhibition at the gallery, the Dutch artist Katinka Lampe returns to Paris with a new set of paintings. In Lamp, it is almost always a question of our relation to identity, whether intimate or openly exposed. This time, it is through the prism of social networks that she considers the problematic construction of the image, of oneself and the other.

Katinka Lamp paints portraits of young adults. If the resemblance may seem obvious, it is not important. Each painting is more of an attempt to deny the art of portraiture. The model represents an issue rather than a personality. She moves away from it and relates her models of accessories and masks, and one understands then that the practice of the portrait is the pretext of a fertile imagery, more than a genre whose codes must be followed. From an idea, from a visual impression of beauty and strangeness, she touches on another reality.

Instadentity takes again in painting the narcissistic ambiguity encouraged by the social networks and whose teenagers are the first victims, the first players too. To wait for the confirmation of the others, to engage in a permanent competition: the models of Katinka Lampe raise the question of the virtual link, which aspires to the real one. The statement is neither critical nor negative, it is primarily a work of creation. How to welcome the image of the other and build his own? It finally offers the viewer the same games as on Instagram: identities built and disguised which results in a blur in the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other. Behind the expression of virtual identity is also question of potential identity.By taking care of the image and the artifices of his models, the artist increases the possibilities and plays on the multiple reality of the personality. The desire for transformation, crystallized by social networks, projects identity towards the future as a desired becoming, always more beautiful.