“I am myself the subject of the work, self-portrayed twice: in the role of both husband and wife, depicted as a happily married couple.”

These are the words with which Daniela Comani—an Italian artist based in Berlin—introduces the photographic project.

Portraits captured in different everyday moments—while walking along the beach, sitting across from one another in the kitchen, lying on the bed, or during a vacation in Japan—only upon closer inspection do the protagonists of Happy Marriage reveal their strange and unsettling resemblance. “It is not about sexual stylization or cross-dressing,” the artist clarifies, but rather a study of behavioral codes and personal identity, with a constant reference from the micro to the macrocosm.
Through the banal reproduction of male-female clichés, Comani probes deeply into both the individual and social sphere: ‘traveling, driving, explaining’ represent the male domain; ‘listening, communicating, allowing oneself to be led, being devoted’ are feminine qualities.
Happy Marriage contains a strong performative element. A long and private phase of character construction precedes the photographic shot, followed by meticulous work in finishing and digital photomontage: “the clothes and accessories I wear in the photographic shots are part of my everyday wardrobe. The faces were not digitally altered; facial expressions and posture, together with beard and makeup, determine the success of the two different roles.”

Almost like storylines developing over time with coherence—yet also with a kind of positive obsession—Daniela Comani’s works often highlight the multiplicity and possible pluralism of the world around us. There is no single truth, but rather infinite possibilities.
For the viewer, with whom the artist develops a form of complicity, remains the pleasure of deciphering the signs scattered throughout the work, reconstructing the narrative of Happy Marriage, just as—elsewhere—the image of a puzzle (Spiel doch mit! Come and Play Too, 1999), which reproduces representations salvaged from the television stream, or the fate of a hypothetical ‘I’ that, in the sound installation Ich war’s. Tagenbuch 1900–1999 (It Was Me. Diary 1900–1999), reads its own diary, where 365 historically significant events are gathered, each described as if experienced by that single narrating voice—thus embodying Einstein, Hitler, Hirohito…