In a house in Buenos Aires lives a slim woman, with the appearance of an elf and wearing a colorful sweater with geometric motifs. She has serious eyes, thick and symmetrical eyebrows. After cleaning and tidying up toys left behind by her children, she locks herself in her workshop and puts on a Nina Hagen playlist. She adjusts her camera on the tripod and begins to make faces with her face, some more funny, others more grotesque. She sits in front of the computer tired, she puts on some glasses and watches a chapter of the animated series she She Ra: the princess of power. She ends the chapter and is moved by old photos of a dog that she loved very much and that she passed away.
She sighs, she walks back through the workshop, finds a pink wig and puts it on. She programs the camera and takes some photos posing as an anime magical warrior, she laughs to herself and is satisfied with some photos. She goes back to the computer and starts Photoshopping those images: lengthening her hair and widening her eyes, adding layers and layers of digital makeup, and repeating herself in various places in the frame. The thin woman is Flavia da Rin and for more than 20 years she has been reflecting on stereotypes, transformation and the possibility of representing oneself in different ways.
Flavia Da Rin was born in Buenos Aires in 1978. She studied at the National School of Fine Arts “Prilidiano Pueyrredon”, where she specialized in painting. In the late 2000s she got her first digital camera and began taking pictures of everything she was near, including herself. She learned in a self-taught way to handle the camera without becoming a photographer, without working to the letter with those rules that language proposes. Her photograph could serve to transfer some of the logic of what she learned with painting.
With a Canon 3.3 camera. megapixels, she Flavia put together a series of photographs where she appeared several times in a scene. Three Flavias talking in the bathroom, one Flavia sharing a lipstick with another more shy one. These women were unretouched and dressed like anyone from the early 2000s, they could be mistaken for mannequins from the clothing brand Joan of Arc or Desiderata. There was a thoughtful attitude in their poses, you could see it in their gaze and how they interact with each other. In these everyday scenarios, a melancholy and depressive atmosphere was generated, as if they were all dull fairies. One could compare these early works to the scenes in Sofia Coppola's film The Virgin Suicides, where time is heavy and the characters are beautiful but adrift. These photographs work as an emotional record of the time and are combined with the rise of the internet, the opportunity to be others by creating a profile on social networks. Now the identity could be transformed into a story to be read anywhere in the world.
Beginning in the mid 2000's she began using Photoshop to edit her photographs and add layers of color, texture and light to her characters. Now, the artist invents a fantasy world with costumes and gradient colors. They are digital scenes where she inhabits absurdity and terror: genderless characters with exaggerated grimaces and gray or violet skins. There are color planes made with plasticine, mocking masks that seem to invoke death or beings that want to sell something that it would be better not to buy. The expression of her characters is reminiscent of the children in the Nickelodeon series Angela Anaconda, curious and wicked, with their frozen faces, similar to those of corpses.
The pandemic was also an event that gave rise to transformations. People froze in time, and those who had the opportunity devoted themselves to domestic life. The people looked like a generic painting of a building lobby or doctor's office, still and waiting for calm or paranoia. Flavia Da Rin was able to capture this tense climate in a series of digital images posted on her Instagram. In them she appears transformed into eccentric ladies surrounded by cookies, stuffed animals, remote controls and cleaning supplies. They look like a group of women from Buenos Aires who dedicated themselves to fighting crime in their youth, like magical girls from Japan, Sailor Scouts with a Day supermarket card. intruder spying on them. They are works that try to discuss how time passes in the pandemic and explore a class z apocalyptic scenario, as opposed to the one promised by Hollywood in its films. A woman locked up with her wigs and her fears, that is the catastrophe that the artist proposed.
In the work of Flavia Da Rin, transformation appears as a mechanism to present ourselves to the world. Questions about identity also appear as an agglomeration of nuances or its opposite, one more label that we use as a uniform, without the possibility of dirtying or wrinkling it. They are works of art that look with suspicion and ridicule at the stereotypes offered by the media, cultural consumption and habits that no one dares to change. It seems that living is an act of interpretation: choosing a favorite color, a hairstyle that benefits us and selecting the right words, those that allow us to make friends and scare away possible enemies.
The artist is interested in composing and interpreting various characters. Before taking the photo or sitting down to edit in front of the computer, she imagines them: her walk, her tone of voice, her gestures, even her feelings. There is an acting job, of putting yourself in someone else's shoes and then creating the scene and the world. Flavia's characters are not extensions of her personality, they have a close and distant relationship with her. They are creations that come from the worlds that the artist consumes and inhabits: art galleries, home, music, among others.
Flavia has a map of references, as diverse and selective, as an album of children's figures. These influences range from Twin Peaks, Jem and the Holograms, cross-dressing and anime, to the forgotten women of Western art history. These references serve to break the myth that artists are only interested in grandiose themes such as life or death: they can also be interested in the colors that appear in a soap opera or copy the Japanese drawing style to design a wig or a pair of eyes. Each artist invents her own toolbox to start a work of art and Flavia's box is full of glitter, stickers and colored plastic.
The world has changed a lot from 2000 to today. People have become experts in editing the images on their cell phones, the most ambitious have set up YouTube channels to give makeup tips, and others have become drag queens who aspire to be part of a reality show. As if they were the steps of a skin routine, people put together a story of themselves and expose it to the public. The world, like Flavia Da Rin, is free to invent a mask, where lies and truth are make-up for self-invention. Identity can be a sketch that never ends, with its contradictions and mysteries, but above all full of fantasy.