48 Conscious Pariahs

“I can, therefore I am” and “I rebel, therefore we are”; two quotations, by Simone Weil and Albert Camus, respectively, brought together in a single statement, reveal the meaning of these nameless faces of human dignity. The first portraits in the series appeared at the end of the exhibition Beings Out of Range, more as the beginning of another possible outcome than as a conclusion.
My painting evolves in a spiral, finding resonances in earlier works. In this case, inspired by the singular Arendtian concept of the “conscious pariah”, I venture to revisit — as a quotation or a note in the margin — the meaning of 48 Portraits, Gerhard Richter’s celebrated work, which had been the subject of a previous study. My choral proposal, this anonymous and plural human network, wishes to arouse the German painter’s polyptych from its ideological and historical slumber in order to point critically to certain absences. The intention is to reveal another form of knowledge, marginalised because it is uncomfortable, which unfortunately leaves no trace in encyclopaedias.