About

 

The self-portrait, as an artistic genre, is both an act of self-observation and a representation of oneself. It transcends the aesthetic to become an ontological reflection: an exposure of oneself to oneself. Consequently, the self-portrait surpasses its status as a mimetic image (in the Platonic sense) to become a performative act where the artist reveals him/herself as a subject, exposing his/her vulnerability in the creative process.

But what happens when the artist creates a self-portrait in tears? When tears, veiling their gaze, disrupt this reflexive process? Does a tear-filled gaze remain a gaze? What does it look at? And if, as Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, the gaze is at the heart of the portrait, how does a spectator interact with a portrait in tears?

 

These are the questions that the project Self-Portrait of Myself in Tears explores through the tearful gaze of the artist.  In response to the loss of her father, she captures her mourning in a series of photographic and video works, freezing these ephemeral moments of vulnerability and turning her crying into an act of ontological nudity.  In these tearful strip-teases, the artist reveals to the world (and to herself) a face distorted by sobbing, erased by tears that she merges with fragments of lekythoi —funerary vases—and images of the weeping Aphrodite of the Acropolis Museum. 

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By exposing her tears as a solitary state, devoid of narrative context, Kosmatopoulos transforms emotion into a pure idea. It is not about probing the cause of the tears but reflecting on their inability to be verbalized. The act of crying becomes a performance—raw, universal, and intimate — where tears testify to a failure of language while simultaneously embodying their own power: that of expressing the unspeakable. Her tears shift focus from the eyes, drawing the gaze toward a space of excess, an invisible reality beyond it. Like the mourners of antiquity, the artist’s tears transcend personal grief to form a shared language of vulnerability and connection. In this work, tears transcend  the limits of the face to embody both the unspeakable and its expression, offering a bridge between the intimate and the collective, between individual pain and universal empathy.

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