Looking at the faces of people I try to see their past, their victories, and their defeats. I try to guess their feelings today and their hopes for the future.

Time rapidly turns the present into the past: what was just now becomes a minute, an hour, a month, a year ago. Meanwhile we are left with piles of our memories, photographs or letters, in which we try to trace the line of our fate and prepare for the future. Through our youth, which, like any youth, is the promise of the future, through our lost opportunities, through our thinking about death. Through the sequence of our acts, ones we choose and ones we don’t. Through our pain, suppressed by the anaesthetic quality of time.

Portraits are painted on an imaginary wall, on which we notice pieces of posters, photographs, indiscernible ads. These are the signs and traces of the flashing time on which we fix our eyes, capturing the disappearing moment.

In portraits, I try to convey the concentrated state of human beings peering into their past, attempting to perceive their present and foresee their future.

Katya-Anna Taguti