Repeating Ourselves

Since the dawn of ages man has communicated through drawings and paintings. In the early cave paintings we find not only depictions of the surroundings and the animal life, but also mainly of people. It is interesting that we go to big efforts to recreate what we see and how we see ourselves in order to transcend, at least by leaving a footprint of our existence.

Through the thousands of years that followed this trend continued and we became much more sophisticated in documenting those facts or records of our lives.

We have since been repeating the same motions, repeating the act of projecting our thoughts, ideas and self image into all sorts of medium like rock frescos, sculpture, print, photography. We endlessly reproduce the human form in many ways as if to become inmortal through the expression of these forms. As if we would live forever through these time enduring stone impressions of ourselves.

In a way, facial expression and emotions could be considered the original sin, the apple that had us cast from eden. For facial expression was the precursor of communication and gave way to the more sophisticated methods of communication like language and writing. It is not by chance then that all art forms are filled with endless iterations of the human form, especially the face.

Even today we continue to observe this trend as we strive to reproduce the face with extreme realism for films, commercials, tv, etc... You could say that some consider the human face to be the holy grail of art.