Laurent La Gamba, Works on canvas - Portraits and Self-portraits (1998 - 2001) Artist Laurent La Gamba tries to explore the subversive potential of consumer society to produce satirical canvases. It's a symbiosis of precarious ego fictions and pictorial discovery of the fundamental instability of self. The artist is playing with consumer emblems and marketing to draw an ironical point of identification with the character photographed. For the artist the self-portrait genre is an instrument, delivering a complete range of self-representation. The portraits and self-portraits melodramatize and reimagine the artist's own physiognomy displaying a kind of modern existential heroism turned into absurdity or sometimes social and political criticicism. The figure as a neurotic and obsessive pattern is absolutely predominant in all his work. His interests lie in showing how identification processes can go both ways, from one extreme to the other and sometimes how different identities can coexist for some time before a path is chosen.