The Portrait Beyond the European Canon: Reinventions in Latin-Caribbean Art

Abstract

In contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art, portraiture and self-portraiture become spaces of confrontation between identity and alterity, where artists rewrite visual histories and dispute regimes of representation inherited from colonialism. This article examines the strategies of Ana Mendieta, Firelei Báez, Leasho Johnson, Éder Oliveira, and Chiachio & Giannone, articulating visual description and critical interpretation through decolonial approaches. By observing how these works negotiate memory, body, and territory, the study highlights modes of producing subjectivities that activate interlocutions among different cosmologies, histories, and visualities. In dialogue with the theme Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations, it is argued that the analyzed practices establish sites of symbolic dispute in which cultural differences are articulated through tensions, frictions, and aesthetic reinventions. The methodology combines formal and contextual analysis, emphasizing how these productions subvert the Eurocentric paradigm of portraiture and propose visualities that confront structures of power, expanding the field of inquiry into identity and representation in contemporary art. The results indicate that these self-representational practices constitute critical devices capable of challenging Eurocentric representational codes and proposing new visual models for imagining identities and histories in the Latin American and Caribbean context.