When you look in the mirror, what face do you see? Not a trick question! Do you see your own visage as it actually is or do you tend to see the face of ten, twenty years earlier? We often think of faces as unchanging, until a glance from just the right angle shows us the mortality of time marching across our faces. In his work, Mexican artist Rogelio Manzo deals with the fragility of life and notion of beauty by deconstructing and distorting the faces of his subjects.
As a society, we’ve become so obsessed with the idea of youth and perfection as beauty– that the end result seems to be that we are ending up with a homogenized standard of attractiveness. The unique face, the one with a bent nose or not-quite-perfect teeth is reconstructed through surgery and orthodontia to fit the idealized “normal”. We all begin to look the same, losing our sense of what makes us each rare and uncommon.
If you’d like to see more of Rogelio Manzo‘s work, please visit his website and Facebook page.
All images are via the artist’s Facebook page.
