El rostro ajeno

Galleries ethall and The Goma are pleased to invite you to the opening of “El rostro ajeno” by Sergio Prego on Saturday 20th January.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film The Face of Another, based on the novel of the same name by Kōbō Abe, portrays a man disfigured in an accident at work. He lives behind the bandages that hide his face from society and even from his wife. He harbours frustration and resentment at feeling marginalised, socially in the simplest of everyday activities and, affectively, in the repulsion distilled by his wife’s distant behaviour. In this condition, his psychiatrist proposes to reconstruct his face by means of a thin prosthetic mask which, thanks to advanced technology, simulates the subtle shapes and textures of the human face in a plausible way. To do this, they make a mould of a stranger’s face so that, when the mask is put on, the character is stripped of his own identifying features. He then begins to perceive the world through the lens of the alienation that comes from the absence of identity.