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The vulgar self-portrait stakes its claim in the "real"; resorting to such locutions as "personality", "history" and "empiricism". But what paths exist beyond non-objectivity? Sydney painter, Mark Titmarsh has forged one way via a classical attention to the demands of space, depth, and composition, to arrive at a style of portraiture where the face becomes "distilled character".
Some will recognise the faces in a Titmarsh painting from popular portrait painting or from standard textbooks on Renaissance Art, thus his work is often quickly pigeonholed as PostModern quotation. However he strongly denies this, citing Nietzsche and heavy rap as his major influences. He talks of his work being fuelled by a Nietzschean conception of "the hammer as cut-creator". Thus, rather than appropriation/quotation, Titmarsh claims that he "allows things to eternally return as they must."1
Titmarsh sees the portrait not as a mask but a face. He re-invigorates the portrait, affirming the ''window-of-the-soul" without buying into the "look-of-the-West": images that guarantee subjectivity rather than knowledge; images which chart the collision of the subject and the real, presented innocently and in good faith.
And yet these images seem to be playing with the denial of the subject, or with the subject's complete immersion in culture, or perhaps how subjectivity is guaranteed - becomes legible - via the inescapable "uniqueness" of an individual's experiences. It could be all at once, and yet none of these. The meanings that these images bring into play are always shifting, always sliding away into other territory. But, surprisingly, irony is always figured as absence.
Indeed, one of Titmarsh's most appealing features is his ironising of irony, the figuring of an intentional sincerity in the posture