A portrait is a depiction of a specific individual, which became an established style of painting during the Renaissance. Since then, many artists have created portraits with a wide variety of themes. Some portraits have pursued realism while others have emphasized the beauty or exaggerated the ugliness of their subjects. In the past, the creation of a portrait typically required the artist and subject to be face-to-face, but in Portrait of dazzle, neither the artist nor the subject know who the other is (and in this case, the subject is not even aware that they are a subject of a portrait). In this series, portraits of the modern person are created from the countless photos of faces posted online by tracing and projecting the eyes onto a dazzle camouflaged silhouette of a person whose race, sex, hairstyle, or body shape differs from that of the original subject. By using photographs of real people, Portrait of dazzleencourages viewers to consider that the eyes depicted may belong to people they know or even themselves and brings to attention growing social issues like digital tattoos, deepfakes, and generative AI. Dazzle camouflage was a type of ship camouflage used during World War I. As its name suggests, it was meant to dazzle and confuse the human eye. In an era where radar technology did not exist, an enemy vessel’s range and heading needed to be visually identified for targeting. The complex black and white patterns painted on ships with dazzle camouflage reportedly made it difficult to ascertain the target's distance and direction of movement and hindered the calculation of accurate firing solutions. Because dazzle camouflage is such an apt metaphor for the confusion caused by the uncertain veracity of information online, it is a frequent motif in my work. / Artist Shigeki Matsuyama