CM: Stamatina Doutsouli's Self-Portrait was made from a photograph and was executed with a feel for realism. The artist appears with her long hair twisted behind and she wears a dark woolen turtleneck sweater. Her face turns anxiously towards the viewer. Through the terrible veil of the lack of knowledge awakens the artist's inmost desire to break the darkness so that she may throw light on her unfathomable reality. The portrait's surrounding environment has been scraped by a spatula in search of any kind of light. Doutsouli claims this violence of scraping to evoke the creator's manner and material in an effort to describe as actually as possible a sincere self-portrait. In this case the scraping is no mere effect to impress, but rather the 'truth' of the portrayed person - as evidence of the harsdship of existence. The red traces that develop in two parallel zones across the background are no mere compositional solutions, but rather record particular experiences in the artists life - laden with subjectivity - which signal the human the human condition with an aim to brighten -in an internal way- her biography.
