Behind the expression of virtual identity there also lies the question of potential identity
Three years after her last exhibition at the gallery, Dutch artist Katinka Lampe returns to Paris with a new set of paintings. Lampe’s work nearly always explores the question of our relationship with identity, whether it be intimate or overtly exposed. This time, she envisages the problematic construction of the image of oneself and of the other through the prism of social networks.
Instadentity reworks in painting the narcissistic ambiguity encouraged by social networks, of which adolescents are the first victims – and also the first players. Waiting for confirmation from others, implicated in a constant competition: Katinka Lampe’s models pose the question of the virtual connection, which aspires to reality. The result is neither criticism nor negative; it is, in the first instance, creative work. How does one accept the image of the other and construct one’s own? Finally, Lampe offers spectators the same games as Instagram: identities constructed and disguised which result in a haziness in the reciprocal recognition of the self and the other. Behind the expression of virtual identity there also lies the question of potential identity. By tending to the image and artifices of her models, the artist augments possibilities and plays with the multiple reality of the personality. The desire for transformation, crystallised by social networks, projects identity towards the future, like a desired-for becoming, always more beautiful.
