NEW YORK, N.Y.- The Esso Gallery presents “Portraits,” on view through July 31, 2004. The exhibition includes portraits by more then 50 different artists, different histories, backgrounds, ideas and media. Investigating how this very traditional theme gets re-interpreted in contemporary art, we’ve put together these differences to show how a practice that is the first, most debated and common, in art history has changed over time.

Portraiture began a very long time ago to satisfy the necessity of delivering to posterity the physical appearances of the dead (the earliest forms known to us are in fact the clay, wax or metal masks directly traced from dead faces). The Romans were already using portraits as an instrument of propaganda. The figures of philosophers or emperors posed in hieratic and solemn forms had not just the intention of immortalizing the appearance of that person, but also to idealize the human, psychological and moral image for that person to leave behind. From then on the meaning of the portrait has changed according to the patron or the artist’s ideas and the issue would be too long of a discussion for a press release.

The portraits shown here belong to different classes, the referent for some is sentimental or idealist and they result charged with tension because their subjects belong to live experience, to emotion. The more interesting to us are the ones born from a meeting between impression and idea, between visual suggestion and intellectual approach.