Here’s Looking at Me
From portraits to selfies, self-obsession has made the transition into the digital age
From portraits to selfies, self-obsession has made the transition into the digital age.
The portrait of the artist today is Ellen Degeneres’ Oscar Selfie, and in it, art finds a new idiom for self-obsession. At Nawaz Modi-Singhania’s third floor terrace studio on the leafy Laburnum Road in Mumbai, the oil, charcoal and acrylic portraits of mostly Hollywood celebrities are an inevitable extension of it. It is unabashedly celebrity-centric. For Singhania, who also runs a fitness centre and has held four solos focused on the body, it is an extension of the personal study of anatomy. She calculates mathematical balances of faces as she aims to capture 100 per cent physical likeness and expression: Mick Jagger caught mid-scream, Johnny Depp and Elizabeth Taylor juxtaposed on their younger selves, Tom Cruise’s glinting blue eyes, Michael Jackson’s monochrome despondency. Considering that she and her husband, industrialist Gautam Singhania, spent the weekend with Jagger after his recent bereavement, it is hardly that she lacks access to an alternative expression. On the contrary, these images are well-known. In the age of Instagram, Singhania has pointedly used portraiture to freeze a look in which identification with the viewer is at its highest. In an artscape where the portrait has all but disappeared, where top artists are not concerned with how a man sees himself being seen, it surfaces in this celebrity-focused format.
“The selfie is the modern-day portrait,” says Kishore Singh, head of