We Have Each Other Don't We

Bernardino has copied, reworked and recreated portrait pieces, giving them a new significance. Her strong marks of white paint are a deliberate act of concealment, isolating the individuals.

Abstracted from its original context, these fragments of reality and embodiment now offer pluralized meanings. The perspective of the portraiture involves exploring cultural attitude [aesthetic, moral, cultural, political]. Our own associations make such experiences pregnant with meaning and help us reconnect to a fragile personal history.

Heightening the contrast is the use of traditional and modern technique: delicate layers of veneer are painstakingly built then sliced visibly with loose brushwork. Blanking the subjects’ faces force the viewer to re-examine the underlying relationship of the sitters. These violent strokes destroy the instinctive perspective and accepted history.

Bernardino’s work is archiving human relations- accumulated, stored and now recovered enabling us to grasp issues of past and present in relation to history and the act of looking.
Ideas of secrecy and privacy also cling to the whole body of work and ultimately question the true intimacy of portraiture.