Persona Incognita
Juliana Engberg

[…]

Tucked away in a little dark room is David Rosetzky’s video portrait of actor Cate Blanchett: a moving-image work that plays with the notion of the stilled image of a person in both photography and painting. Throughout this very detailed work Rosetzky shifts focus, changes the shutter, hones in and departs from his subject. It is a complicated procedure detouring through the techniques of the artist, actor and audience’s craft of observing and avoiding observation. Blanchett is the consummate professional. Her task, as her monologue tells us, is ‘a constant pull between wanting to be seen and not wanting to be seen … hiding behind stuff; one assumes a character … a mask of a certain type’. That is both the professional and personal dilemma for those constantly observed whose role is to perform a role. Rosetzky makes Blanchett peel away these personae, but the layers are constantly reconstituted. There is no Cate to be found in Portrait of Cate Blanchett (2008) except perhaps for a brief flicker in the vein on her neck, the most fleeting of smiles and the slightly lifted left heel, which betrays a millisecond of anxiety. The work is a great rhetorical feat: rewarding, clever, knowing and a fine collaboration with a brainy subject who has elected to remain elusive. I wonder if Rosetzky has looked at Roni Horn’s series of photographs of the actor Isabelle Huppert – one hundred images that pursue the facsimile that is the portrait process – another subject hiding behind a persona.

[…]

Juliana Engberg is Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

This text has been excerpted from the article ‘Persona Incognita’, originally published in Art & Australia, vol 46 no 4, Winter 2009. Reproduced with permission.