MADRID.- The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León will present the movie ZIDANE: A portrait of the 21st Century as part of its new series of exhibits. Throughout the history of art, artists have painted portraits because it was the most direct way of depicting humanity, for some practical and financial reasons and because it was the cool thing to do. Many of these portraits still have the power to bring to life moments in time, acting as temporary social contracts.

The appeal of portraits and the questions they raise are still as poignant as ever. Some of the portraits by Velazquez or Goya that now hang in the Prado or the Louvre need no explanation to trigger an astonishing range of emotions. Even if our age has been marked more by Star Wars than Velazquez, the art of the portrait remains as natural and vibrant as television, cinema or web logs. While Velazquez’s imagination was fuelled by questions of man’s place in a political or social space, the questions that captivate us are different ones. We can trace back to 1972 the point where the last groups of radical architects pondered the question of man’s place in space. It was in this same year that Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Coppola took Hollywood by storm. Photography and film correspond to the attempts in our time to depict the face of humanity on the scale of time. Our lives take place within a protocol of time. And we now need to insert ourselves in the timeline.

To do so, and for the “New Wave”, Serge Beauviallat invented the time code. Without the time code, we would be unable to publish our lives. It was for this reason in particular that we chose to create a portrait using cameras instead of canvas or paper. The portrait is part of the framework of time. While drawing and painting create two dimensional works, a portrait on film inexorably becomes a multidimensional work. This multidimensional aspect needs to be echoed in the picture and sound techniques used to trace it.

The fact that two artists are signing the portrait at once makes it all the more atypical. It can be said that ever since poets began to draw inspiration from the muses, art has found itself at the center of a process of dialogue or conversation. And this is how we view our collaboration. This portrait represents a singular opportunity for Zidane to have a game commemorated for all time. The elegance of Zidane’s game is so aesthetically thrilling that the experiment could not be attempted with any other player. So it is in many ways the subject’s personality that makes such a portrait necessary.

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol created a number of portraits using film. For him, painting a portrait with a camera involved filming someone in real time: while they slept, in a moment of overwhelming glory, etc. Even today, these films have the ability to unsettle us. Perhaps because the people being filmed are looking us straight in the eye, and that we know that they are no longer among us, or perhaps, quite simply, because the images themselves are so raw.

Warhol created a series of portraits called 13 Beautiful Girls. 13 models were asked to stare into the camera, making them look like still images -which is very difficult to achieve. We’ve all tried it: forcing ourselves not to blink, which only brings tears to our eyes. This metaphor gives a good idea of the full complexity of a moving picture portrait.

We could say that Andy Warhol is a direct source for the portrait that we hope to paint. Our portrait is a cinematic portrait of Zinedine Zidane, one of the greatest football players of all time: as soon as Zidane touches the ball, the game begins to breathe differently. It is also the reason why two artists and two football fans will be signing this portrait. Choosing this type of player, this type of subject, is not an individual choice. The choice of Zidane was not the result of a brainstorming session, but rather a decision made by two people on the same wavelength.

It’s a fact. Zidane is the most elegant, and probably the most charismatic of all football players. Our old hero, the legendary footballer Garincha was the political incarnation of the oppressed class of Brazilians of African origin, which identified with Pelé as well. In the 1980s, Platini represented second generation Italian immigrants, and the middle class identified with him. Georges Best was in a constant clash with all forms of authority and, in this sense, was representative of a generation. As for Zidane, by remaining silent, he’s reductant to be a representative or a spokeman. He exists only as a football player. Unlike other football stars who are emblematic of other values too, Zidane is “ in the game” and “in the moment”.