Tessellations:
Sara Berman and Hannah Tilson

Since the Renaissance, the sartorial imagination has inspired some of the most extraordinary interventions into portrait painting. Tessellations, an exhibition which combines new works by Sara Berman and Hannah Tilson, two of London’s most extraordinary reinventors of the portrait mode, channels our present moment through the lens of the historical obsessions with self-presentation in dress. The paintings on show dart back and forth in their layered historical references, taking us into sixteenth-century Venetian wool workshops, the camp performativity of commedia dell’arte, as well as modernist renderings of circus outcasts. Tilson and Berman open up the possibilities for mutual meaning, making sense of dress and the picture, between the self and the sitter’s interior life.

“It is important to start any search with a map of the road to nowhere. My map is The Harlequin. An outfit, a costume The perfect disguise. The perfect reveal. It all starts with her. The Harlequin as a Woman is No Joker. She is the Trickster Whore. The Witch, the Shrew, the Sorceress with the voice of a Harpy. Fear her with her big mouth, her bloody gash. But I digress, I transgress. Me and My Big Mouth.” – Sara Berman

Since the Renaissance, the sartorial imagination has inspired some of the most extraordinary interventions into the genre of portrait painting. By the same token, philosophers, critics, and just about everyone else have recognised the artful possibilities for self-presentation in fashion. ‘Fashion is only the attempt to realize art’, the Elizabethan statesman and metaphysicist Francis Bacon wrote, ‘in living forms and social intercourse.’ It is a truism to say that what a sitter wore or held in a portrait—from a sceptre to a quill pen, a pearl earring to a pitchfork—could tell us as much about their personality as a scrupled brow, a nervous fist, or a broad smile. The present exhibition, Tessellations, combines new works by Sara Berman and Hannah Tilson, two of London’s most extraordinary reinventors of the portrait mode.

Tessellations is an event that far exceeds the rudimentary framework of the conventional two-person show. This exhibition is very much in the tradition of the collaborative display as opposed to the curated group format: think of those enfants terribles of 1980s German art, Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, who worked with cheeky puckish humour on collaged works, often punky takes on fashion; or, around the same time, in New York, the two-person shows staged by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on Bruno Bischofberger’s dime. Like Warhol and Basquiat, an established artist and a young talent, Berman and Tilson are a fascinating pair: first introduced by Alvaro Barrington, their work revels in the exciting possibilities for the revelation and concealment of the self in portraiture, in vibrant and polychromatic pattern-making, and in the sense that the female gaze—looking out, being looked at—can be many things simultaneously: seductive, decisive, vulnerable, and stylish.

This historical sense of the show is also channelled through the lens of the past’s sartorial imaginations. The paintings on show dart back and forth in their layered historical references, taking us into Biblical scenes of domestic labour and divine revelation, sixteenth-century Venetian wool workshops, the camp performativity of commedia dell’arte, as well as modernist renderings of circus outcasts. If, as Aristotle said, ‘the aim of Art is to present not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance’, and as such it is ‘not the external manner and detail [which] constitutes true reality’, then Tilson and Berman open up the possibilities for mutual meaning making across so many forms of art: between the dress and the picture, between the self and their inner significance.

For Tessellations, Berman has produced eight works, split between four paintings and four works on paper; Tilson has made nine paintings. Variations on a theme, Berman’s untitled works on paper are enigmatic and virtuosic. In some versions, the androgynous figure—herself, or someone like herself—is dressed in a ruff, like a Tudor courtesan vying for the attention of a Queen, or else call to mind an actor on the Shakespearean stage, when boys played girls, and the audience were privy to those jokes, insults, and secrets that were kept from unsuspecting characters. Berman’s works, whether the works on paper or the oils, all radiate with the sense of secret-keeping. Despite their monochromatic form, Berman’s self-portraits resemble the pose and posture of the art collages by New York-based Susan Cianciolo, whose intuitive, craft-oriented practice incorporates glossy fashion magazine cut-outs with highly personal associations, which lend both a new tenor of exposure and intimacy. This atmosphere of secret-keeping and code-switching gestures back at least as far as the Renaissance, and to one figure in particular. The comic servant character Harlequin, from the Italian commedia dell’arte, who is characterized by his checkered costume, is central to the work of both artists. Appropriated by Pablo Picasso and other modernists, Harlequin was valued as a trickster and code-switcher who uses wit and resourcefulness to outwit the powerful, often by using a batte, or ‘slapstick’, to change the scenery of the play. It is important to note that Tilson’s Etched in her Face (2024) is paired in the gallery space with Berman’s Renaissance Man 3 (2024).

Here, as in each of her four displayed paintings, Berman adopts the Harlequin’s trademark diamond patterning for the backdrop. This is a decision which casts the foregrounded figure into the role of a shape-shifting loveable rogue, as Berman engages with the history of courtly costume play while doffing her cap to the modernists. Unlike nobles who seek to protect their titles as constant markers of social identity and prestige, or the clergy who lead congregants in praising an all-powerful and everlasting God, Harlequin’s identity is defined by their ability to transform their identity as it suits them. One moment they are such and such, and the next a completely unrecognisable character. Harlequin uses magic, deception, and subterfuge to protect themselves from the protectors of the social order. I see Berman’s artistry as acting in a similar way. In this, Berman ushers in a genuinely contemporary sensibility to the long history of the Harlequin.

It is striking to see this work alongside Tilson’s Etched in her Face, in which we encounter a young woman who pulls back a textured curtain. The whole painting feels as though it has been assembled from a complex network of reflections. Her striking visage, comprised of a build-up of yellow cumulus clouds, investigates the middle distance beyond us. We are intimate and estranged, but absolutely brought into her world. Tilson’s paintings are principally concerned with how we reveal, and how we conceal, ourselves. Hers are paintings about the gulf between who you are with others and who you are alone; about the vertigo and the perpetual desire to be exposed, or to be seen through, and perhaps even annihilated. In these ways, I am reminded of Elizabeth Peyton’s Spencer (1999) which depicts a reclined young and effeminate man, looking intently down to his wrist. Is it his companion, a lover perhaps, who has been lost (not completed?) in the empty space below, or is this a vision of solitude, or the powerful solitude that many of us feel most acutely in the company of others? Like Tilson, Peyton is a master of the intimate portrait when the subject of that portrait is, or else seems, to be unaware of our watching them.

Tilson’s new paintings have a marvellous Op-Art quality, and immediately demand our attention. The myriad shapes—overlapping layers of depth, squares for seeing and triangles for patterning—are carnivalesque. For Tilson, shapes are a means of shifting perspective: the rectangular shape in She Seemed to Ripple (2024), for instance, is at once a hole, rupturing the coherence of space; a portal which breaks into another dimension or fractures the sense of inside and outside, public and private; a decorative device, like a poster, print, or painting on the wall; a window that allows one to observe. For our part, as we stand in front of Tilson’s paintings, we might see the rectangular shapes as the fabric of collage, and as an incongruous object out of place in the scene, but which contributes to an overall formal unity.

Last January, Tilson spent some time in Munich. It was there, amongst the Bavarian State Painting Collections, that she encountered Orazio Gentileschi’s Two Women with a Mirror (c. 1620) for the first time. A representation of the Biblical story of Martha and Mary, only with the figure of Christ, who proverbially shepherds Mary Magdalene away from sin and her sister’s domestic duties, in absentia. In his stead, Mary clutches a rectangular mirror, which she protects from Martha. Inspired by Gentileschi’s version, Tilson brought an oval mirror into her studio, which she used to create complex networks of reflection for her paintings. For the artist, the evocative object of the mirror takes on a multitude of possibilities for reflection, for transformation, and as a means of seeing oneself, as best as one can, as others see us.

It has always fascinated me that when artists decide to incorporate the mirror into their work, with all the technical virtuosity that is required to render the rest of the scene in the glass, and the proportions and likenesses not of what exists but how it is reflected, they break the fourth wall of their practice. We realise, or are rather reminded, that the self-portrait is itself the representation of a representation, a capturing of furtive reflections; above all, a hall of mirrors.

If you look again at Tilson’s Jumbled Echoes, you will see two faces, one in profile (‘real’) and the other addressing the viewer (‘reflection’), both lost in a sea of tartan-patterned primary colours. Tartan, as the simple ‘two over two’ twill weave which creates a bright pattern of interlocking stripes, is synonymous with Scotland, conjuring misty, heather-filled glens and bagpipers in Highland dress. Gentileschi’s title fits here, too: we see two women, or two faces of women, and I cannot help but think of the double that we all play. We perform and act, we dress up and wear the suit. We sit alone and try and recognise oneself. In these ways, Tilson’s paintings are reminiscent of Isabella Ducrot’s canvases and collages: sensitive to the layering of worn materials, in which she uses a brush attached to a stick to create sweeping loose arcs of ink or paint onto fabrics, and arrays of colourful ovals or checkered patterns coalesce with figures, both artists understand the meaning of light, energy, and sartorial sense to create meaning.

As noted, the title of Berman’s second two paintings, Renaissance Man 3 and 4 (both 2024), refers to the humanist ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy, from the notion expressed by one of its most-accomplished advocates, Leon Battista Alberti, who proclaimed that ‘a man can do all things if he will.’ What does Berman’s titles here tell us about what is happening in the works themselves? If Hoodie explicitly refers to the easy-wearing and street-fashionable garment, which in today’s Britain is often synonymous with working-class youth culture, then what does Berman’s transhistorical gesture—all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci’s gifts in the fields of art, science, music, invention, and writing—tell us about portraiture, self- presentation, and the history of art? What is striking, for this writer at least, is how Berman has taken on the Renaissance man, which is coupled with the figure of the harlequin in dress and pattern, to represent the capriciousness of identity and remind us about the perpetual possibility for self-reinvention. Berman has explained how the roles she plays in her paintings are, for her, intensely political: My work deals directly with my experience as a woman and the roles I play within what I perceive as the existing societal constructs’, Berman has said: ‘beneath all my paintings is the trope of the Harlequin as played by a woman… Tradition has this as a male role with the harlequin as a jester, a joker, a lovable rouge. When played by a woman, she is given the role of the Trickster Whore and has no agency. This is the backdrop against which all my paintings are made. I obliterate the Trickster Whore with paint and allow an ‘acceptable’ version of myself to hide the Trickster Whore. I paint myself because these are my politics.

When I visited Berman’s studio in north London earlier this spring, I was struck by a postcard of Giovanni Battista Moroni’s The Tailor (1565– 1570), which was tacked to a supporting wall adjacent to piles of books. In the painting, a handsome young man stares back at us. (Why this fallacy, to which I am a perpetual believer, that the sitter in a self-portrait is looking at us?) His facial hair appears well maintained in the way that only immaculately unkempt beards do; deep valleys of saddled black mark the underneath of his eyes, suggesting long hours meticulously honing his craft in candlelight; his rugged face is cocked to one side in such a way that is both assertively masculine and unquestionably queer. Moroni was best known as the portraitist of the financial and ecclesiastical aristocracy of the Cinquecento, but he was one of the first artists to professionally paint the bourgeoisie. With Moroni’s tailor facing off against Berman’s portraits on the opposite wall, an exciting reciprocity between the works came to mind, like the two painters are lost in rapturous conversation but separated by centuries.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has sought to come to a workable definition of what it means, as a citizen and as an artist, to be ‘contemporary’ and stresses paradoxical but productive anachronisms. Or, to put it another way, to find productive tensions between the past and the present by being aware of the arc of history that separates them. Thus, according to Agamben, ‘Only [they] who perceives the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most modern and recent can be contemporary.’ All of this is to say that Berman’s contemporariness is intimately bound by her awareness of art history, of role-playing and code-switching, and, above all, of the power of the Harlequin. Berman’s four paintings bristle with the fear that accompanies otherness. The figure in them–who both is and is not a self- portrait of the artist–by turns hides from, lurks besides, and confronts the sight of others.

The figure’s expression is unmistakably one of recognition: they see and are seen, and the encounter emphasises rather than nullifies feelings of estrangement from the world outside. In two of the four works, Hoodie 3 and 4 (both 2024), the figure is wearing a hooded garment: seemingly sourced at a halfway house between JD Sports and a Renaissance fabric workshop, it resembles early versions of the chaperon, a highly versatile hat used by men and women, which began as a purely utilitarian form of headgear before becoming a fashionable accoutrement. The hoodie is also, of course, explicitly of our time. Like Berman, Tilson’s subject is nearly herself— but not quite. ‘The figures in my paintings are technically me’, she says. ‘Why only technically you?’, I ask, ‘Why not wholly you?’ Tilson paused for a moment as a wry smile flashed across her lips. ‘When it’s you, it’s a given and you just paint the nose, you don’t paint the likeness of someone else’s nose.’ We should, then, see these figures are archetypes of a kind: as active subjects of their own but derived from the artist’s aspect, and whose face they encounter more than any other. The curves of Tilson’s mirrors, which replicate a version of the same in another object, are often counterposed to curves of pattern and fabric. In Berman, the stakes of dress also speak to how clothes hold the body and what themselves say about one’s autobiography, sense of convention or rebellion, and position of power in the world. If Erasmus’ oft-repeated proverb in Latin, ‘vestis virum facit’, or ‘clothes maketh the man’, is true here it is also because women make themselves in their own image. In this, clothes are a means to an end: perpetual transformation, over and over again.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman