The other face

Article published in the newspaper Berliner Zeitung – Number 225 – date: 25/26 of September 2004.
By Ulrike von Leszczynski

Alfredo Fernández portrays prisoners in Berlin. The Spanish artist sometimes finds out more about them than their own parole officer.

“The time I spent with the painter showed me the deepest realms of my soul. Not only my eyes and face. Almost everything I carry within me is there. It is sometimes too much for me to take.” (Prisoner, 34 years of age)

He could be a murderer. He does not talk about it, about the prison, or about the punishment. There is something matter of fact about the way he speaks, it is obviously something he has to keep at a great distance. As if he wanted to separate life in prison from his real life. But that’s not the way it works - not when the painter is sitting opposite.

It is an unusual experiment. A prisoner and an artist come together in a small, sparsely furnished room. An ashtray is all that stands between the easel and the worn-out armchair where the model sits. A lot of smoking goes on in this room and the cigarette seems to be the only thing keeping the prisoner going during the half hour portrait session, which often passes without a word having been uttered. Many people were convinced the project would not work out. A painter drawing the faces of prisoners, talking to them about how they see themselves, and about fear, anger, pain or remorse.

Did these prisoners deserve what they got? What is the point of having murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers or petty criminals look into their own countenance; look themselves in the face through the eyes of a painter? Alfredo Fernández smiles. It is a winning smile, not affected or arrogantr, and sometimes the otherwise serious expression in his dark eyes even has something mischievous about it. He encounters the men he paints with openness, but also with a perceptible feeling of distance. He is not trying to be their best buddy.

Some of the prisoners might even have thought that this slim fifty-year old was a pushover. They thought having him paint them would turn out to be one of the few longed-for privileges in prison life. They did not notice until they were sitting in the worn-out armchair that they had had been somewhat naïve.

There were many sceptics. Dieter Schultze, parole officer in Berlin, in service for twenty years, was one of them. He knows them all – the conmen, the paedophiles, the murderers. What can an artist see what he can’t? And yet, over time, Schultze came to appreciate the artist’s idea. “There are many ways to climb a mountain”, he now says. It takes a long time before an ex-prisoner sees himself as part of society again, can accept his situation and find his way back to himself – or even perhaps find himself for the very first time.

Dieter Schultze is a man who sees the justice system of which he is a part with a critical eye. To his mind, the conditions in German prisons are a catastrophe from a psychological point of view – the prisoners are merely kept under lock and key and nothing is done for their mental or emotional well-being, something which, in his mind, is vital in life. In the eyes of Schultze, prison means colourless monotony, day in and day out, for many of the 60,700 prisoners in Germany. The cold sound of steel doors being slammed shut, prison food, a walk around the yard and monotonous work. The parole officer does not want to be misunderstood; it is not his intention to change the convictions or the sentences meted out, and he does not sympathise with nor is he concerned about the prisoners, it is the nature of prison life that bothers him: "The system is so perfectly managed, that it is slowly stifling any notions of making amends”, he believes. In German prisons, the upshot is that many inmates end up feeling nothing at all.

This changes when they sit for Alfredo, the painter. A man of about 30 years of age is sitting in the Spartan room on the old armchair. His t-shirt depicts a Berlin bear mascot, its teeth snarling like a bull terrier. This comic-like image might reflect his state of mind. “I am hard”, he is saying. It is the eighth sitting for model and painter and fragments of his life story fill the room, surrounded by a fog of cigarette smoke. The bull terrier man is a day release prisoner, only having to return behind bars every evening punctually at 9.30 pm.

“I'm going to be a father soon”, he says, as Alfredo scrapes his pastel chalk quietly across the paper. The man’s voice sounds a little sceptical, almost questioning. “A father, OK”, the painter mumbles, falls silent and continues with his drawing. He does not take his eyes off his model for minutes on end. Several prisoners broke off their sessions, as they did not want to or were unable to withstand the inquisitive stare of the painter. You don't look people in the eye in prison, they said. That's a form of attack.

The sessions are a gift of time for the prisoners. Painter and model sometimes spend two or three hours - 120 or 180 minutes – together: time to talk and to listen. For many of them, at first, it is an experience they had almost forgotten existed. It has been a long time since anyone asked them the kinds of questions Alfredo does. For example, “Do you feel loved?” Many of the prisoners did not realise until they were sitting in the armchair that a portrait is an unexpected encounter with oneself. A kind of provocation.

A great number of stubbed out cigarettes are now lying in the ashtray next to the easel. Brown hair, olive green eyes surrounded by dark shadows, a snub nose and a thin-lined mouth look up from the paper; the last detail to be added is the fierce-looking bear on the prisoner’s t-shirt. The result is a somewhat distorted portrait in the Expressionist style, not a mirror image. It conveys a mood. The bull terrier man on the paper comes across as a sad clown.
The model looks at his other face on the easel and begins to interpret what he sees – a face full of expectation, but also with some fear in the painted eyes. "Panic, yeah, maybe panic”. He sees this as progress, evidence that he has maybe become more open compared to how he was before. Amid this quiet moment of contemplation, Alfredo asks him: “When is the baby coming?" “November” is the reply.

In the armchair, his hands propping up his chin, the model begins to speak. “In prison, I didn’t let anyone come near me. I didn't talk about what I had been put away for, or about my sentence. I was constantly looking at the clock. My fiancée stopped coming and my daughter now calls another man papa. When I looked in the mirror, I felt completely indifferent. I did everything they expected of me. I became a good actor, honestly”. “Are you really?” the painter asks.

Alfredo Fernández hangs up all eight portraits in the room. The first pictures from the series show a face with an abrasive expression on it. A man who only one year ago said of himself, “you ignore yourself really”. And then the eyes on the pictures start to look at the observer; first of all sceptically, then inquisitively, but always alert. “Which of them is the real picture of you?” Alfredo asks. “Don’t we all wear a mask?” the bull terrier man asks in response.

Why does Fernández paint in prison? His own path towards painting led through phases of trial and error, first of all at art school in Spain and later during his apprenticeship as a scene painter for the theatre. He broke off with his very middle class Spanish family and embarked on a quest to find the meaning of life abroad which included periods of study in Sociology and Philosophy. It was in Berlin that he found the way to his portraits. What was it that moved him to do this project, which he initiated himself? It was that eternal question that art has always sought to answer; the transience of our existence, the short time we have to live our life and what we make of it. "I am not a therapist," Alfredo says, "but I can listen. Not nearly enough listening is done. Today’s society is like channel-hopping on television, and if we don’t like something, we quickly switch over to something else”. But listening was not always easy for the painter. “Sometimes I hid behind the easel”, he says. Sometimes, the models sitting in the armchair two metres away were people who no longer had any idea of who they were. People who saw a happy face in their dark portraits, because they did not want to own up to their own unhappiness; or their crime, their punishment, or anything at all. On many occasions, the hatred of everything and everyone lingered long in the small room, as if the prisoners had thrown away the key to their own self.

“That’s not me, it’s my father”. (Prisoner, 31 years of age).

Prisoners who are in self-denial are a problem in the opinion of parole officer Schultze. ”It’s something society has to deal with when they are released”. Many of them leave prison without having dealt in any way with the crime they committed. In Berlin there are nearly 4,500 people in prison, half of them for longer than one year. ”Those who are not religious or who do not have the support of their families fall apart when they are inside”, Schultze says. This is not an opinion, but rather a statement of fact.
Most people in society, whose tax money goes to pay for the prison system, think that criminals deserve nothing better. It is a society that knows that the victims of crime often receive no help whatsoever. So why should the perpetrators? The parole officer thinks there should be a great deal more work done to bring perpetrators and their victims together for mediation. "The perpetrators must be made to look their victims in the eye".

When they sit for Alfredo, they learn - perhaps - to see themselves. The painter has found a special location for the first large presentation of his prisoner portraits – the Federal Ministry of Justice. The employees at the ministry now have to walk by the pictures every day on their way to the canteen. And looking back at them are 200 painted faces that reflect many years of incarceration. The painter's intention is to show human beings on the walls of the ministry. There will be no information underneath saying murderer, rapist, child abuser or thief.