Please like me #1

A graduate of the Fine Arts of Liège (ESAVL, 2021), Margaux Blanchart uses the image that we reflect of ourselves and tools that are social networks, as fields of experience. The visual artist, who only uses herself as a model, appears and disappears from one artwork to another, performing attitudes borrowed from our contemporary stereotypes or embodying ambivalent but free images that emerge, circulate or yet persist.

In Please like me #1 (1), the artist pushes, not without a touch of humor, the experience of the selfie (photographic self-portrait made with a smartphone and shared with other people on social networks) into a video performance that catalyzes the expectations and the frustrations of an anonymous character (or one of the artist’s doubles?).

This situation echoes the daily life of any artist whose auto-entrepreneurship represents the main part of the activity: sending applications for artistic prizes (recognition), for exhibitions or to be defended by a gallery (visibility), for scholarships or funds to create and design. Selling ​​oneself, making oneself attractive, capturing attention, being loved: Please like me!

While Narcissus seeks the validation of his reflection by the others (this implacable crowd), and while artist Andy Warhol predicted (1968) 15 minutes of glory for everyone, we remember that the practice of the portrait constituted, from his birth, most of his production (a 15-minute break was then necessary). The doubt distilled between reality and fiction, between physical, private and public spaces, extends into the virtual space of the Instagram account « utilisateur2937 », regularly fed with selfies throughout Art au Centre.

(1) The Please like me project is deployed in two windows and an Instagram account @utilisateur2937. Please like me #1 will be followed by Please like me #2 on the next issue (AAC#10).