For Eder Olguìn, painting is both an exercise in memory and a fate of forgetfulness. The artist evokes a past time, distorts its memories, interrogates the present; in the time of painting, a personal geography takes shape. Temporal and spatial boundaries fade into the figures-like-silhouettes presences living both in the paintings and in the life of the artist.
The selected works have been realized since 2020, and although belonging to different periods of Olguìn’s production, they are all born out of a common need: finding oneself in the image of the other. In particular, the artist deprives subjects’ faces of their distinctive features and synthesizes the figures veiling their identity. Focusing on these empty faces, the title of the exhibition Face ID paradoxically recalls the facial recognition system developed in recent years for the latest smartphones: a mathematical algorithm capable of mapping, recognizing and remembering our facial features. It is no coincidence that Eder Olguìn often uses photography as the starting point of his work, since it represents an essential tool to abstract memories and create a personal visual archive. The artist makes use of old photographs from his family albums or from recent shots which capture significant occasions or daily life episodes. Some of the photos behind the works relate to his childhood memories: the summer of ’97 in Mexico with his family, playtime moments with his brother, some neighbors as children; in other photos the artist is grown up, caught while sitting in his Parisian apartment before moving out. The photographs serve as matrices of the work, they activate a transfiguration process which takes place in the vivid and saturated colors of painting. Reality crops out, while real people become faceless characters in the theater of memory. The portrayed subjects, with their blurred physiognomy, are suspended in a vague and metaphysical space, dressed with a nostalgic and suspended atmosphere. By almost completely erasing facial features, Eder Olguìn prevents the viewers from recognizing the other, instead making it possible to recognize themselves in the other: we have been those children that Eder has painted, those boys drinking at bar counter. We have been that girl sitting by the window, and we have been seated for the last time on the couch of a house we would never enter again.

It is precisely on the basis of the overlapping and sharing different experiences that Eder Olguìn has conceived his latest ongoing work. The artist presents for the first time a body of works from the series Identité conforme, which involves the creation of 2730 portraits. Each portrait is the result of the combination of five passport photos belonging to the artist’s beloved ones, who all come from different countries. The artist creates a layering of their faces, as if they were semitransparent surfaces: that of Ines, French-Argentinean, of Veronica, French-Italian, of Aline, French-Vietnamese, of Youssef, Moroccan, and finally his own face – Eder is Mexican, Parisian from adoption, with an Italian education and with lybian roots on his mother’s side. The series, taking its cue from a reflection on the artist’s identity and status as an immigrant in Europe, is configured as a mèlange of somatic features and geographical coordinates. By blending five faces Eder invents thousands of new identities. The use of small passport photos, in fact, alludes recognizability needed in identity documents. 

Each face has its own grammar, its own way of signifying and expressing itself through the marks on the skin, the eyes, the lips, the space between the forehead and the chin. This somatic grammar allows us to be seen and recognized. Once the face has been veiled, erased, altered or multiplied, it becomes an unreadable story, a secret, a mystery. Eder’s portraits float between the realism and truth of the photographic image and its painterly reworking, in a borderland such as that identified by the German sociologist and philosopher George Simmel in his aesthetics and sociological studies collected in The face and the portrait. Essays on art (1985). Simmel wrote that what we see in man is what is durable in him; in his face is drawn, as a cross section through geological layers, the history of his life. While contemporary thought has thematized the face from an anthropological, aesthetic, philosophical, political and religious point of view, in the field of contemporary visual arts it is not only represented, but refigured: no longer a simulacrum, an effigy or a portrait for the preservation of someone’s memory, but a land to be investigated, a surface where identity can be reshaped and memory itself can be manipulated. Thus, in Olguìn’s works the image is fulfilled in a fleeting and fragmentary synthesis, in which the act of recognition is a pure hypothesis. It is just one face, among the many possible ones.