Custom Size is one of four video works by Francesca Fini in the Su Misura collection, which explores the concept of contemporary identity by combining digital image-making and manipulation with historic portraiture. This piece examines both portraiture and self-portraiture.
This is a video collage that plays on the concept of contemporary identity, through manipulation and processing of iconic images of the history of portraiture and self-portrait, starting with the impressive Portrait of Gerard Andriesz Bicker, by Bartholomeus van der Helst (c. 1642).
This piece plays with the concept of contemporary identity as mediated by the aesthetics, language, and dynamics imposed by the use of social media, mobile phones, and tablets. The ideas explored within the work are many: the new fake illusion that everything is customizable and how the orgy of images, paradoxically, must coexist with the dramatic downsizing of our gaze, trapped in ever smaller screens, more and more claustrophobic.