Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

Life Masks consists of combinations of paintings and photographs, presented as little installations, and representing the portraits of 16th century oil paintings culled from important collections while cruising their depots. The installations are presented in an unusual way, for example perpendicular to the wall, showing a sandwich of two photos of the painting; the front and the back with the registration labels, which are normally hidden. Or a portrait, which is extended to the floor, complete with a ‘dress’ on an easel-like construction.
The old paintings show unknown people portrayed by unknown 16th Century masters and are brought to the surface again by Leiderstam. Making them alive, giving them a body, they become protagonists in an encounter with the visitor and where the gallery space becomes a stage set. Three of these old paintings are from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and are the subject of more then a century of art investigation. The connoisseurship of famous art historians, like Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929), is at stake when they, as specialists, are attributing the same work to different painters. Looking at these portraits becomes a fetishistic act of finding the ‘master’, or maybe a desire of a more sexual nature is evoked when our gaze into the portrait ‘en face’ is returned by a beautiful man or woman. Or do we see the gaze of the painter?