Artworks

Jorma Puranen

Finnish, b. 1951

Shadows, reflections and all that sort of thing, #24, 2003

Chromogenic print, diasec mounted

38 x 29 1/8 in. (96.52 x 73.98 cm)

Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund, 2003

In Puranen's photographs of painted portraits (literally portraits of portraits) the artist is less concerned with the subject of the painting — the person depicted, the face painted — than with the disconnect between subject and viewer, the distance that remains unbridgeable between two people, whether one is painted and one not, or indeed, when two people meet in person. However intangible, there is always the unknowable. Two people cannot inhabit one space, one mind, one heart.