The Salmon Coloured Dress (A Menina do Vestido Salmão) is a reinterpretation of the work The salmon coloured dress (O Vestido Cor de Salmão), a Paula Rego (portuguese painter born in 1935, lives and works in London, UK) lithograph from 2001. My focus in this artwork was to understand, using another medium, the spatial displacement of the figure between the three different moments/movements that are portrayed in the work by the artist.
I work with black and white, and not colour, so that there's the least possible "noise", disturbance, and attempt to make the salmon dress stand out in centre of the picture. The crayon colouring creates an opposition to the depth and perspective of the photograph, producing a two-dimensional space in which the notion of volume is almost lost, almost like in the lithograph used as reference, where the dress itself stands out from the various other elements. I have been working on this project since 2011 but until recently I hadn't quite found the format that I felt the work required. It's first form was a flipbook, but that display seemed too superficial and I believed that the pictures needed a bigger and better treatment. Only now did I manage to succeed as I wished to.
I used myself as a model, not necessarily because the work had a personal dimension or that I wanted to turn them into self-portraits, but because it seemed the best way to capture the full expressions and body language I was looking for - perhaps from an inability to communicate my intentions to a third party. In fact, that figure, that body, is as anonymous as Paula Rego's model, who shows up in many of her works and is nothing more than a generic type, just a body that is used during a certain period of time and is forgotten afterwards.
This reinterpretation of the picture by Paula Rego aims to address several other questions, namely some which are personally dear to my photography. When I combined within the same paper support photography and drawing, I purposely wanted to create a representational space for the harmonious coexistence of the two techniques, having in mind the questions risen from the inclusion of photography within the History of Art - a questioning that was particularly intense when the medium first appeared (late 19th century) and yet one that now seems to have somewhat faded.
However, it's worth mentioning that photography is, still today, regarded as an external element to art - one should only look at the curricula of the BA degree in Art History of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon (F.C.S.H - U.N.L.), which I attended. In the entire course photography has no place, contrary to architecture, painting and sculpture, the fine arts, which are extensively studied. So, it seemed to me, and in spite of the arts and media evolution, entirely relevant to literally place side by side two techniques that are seldom found together - photography and drawing.
