Celia Rakotondrainy's debut solo show in the U.S. highlights her signature double-exposed self-portraits that explore the artist's dual Malagasy and French heritage. The cultural diversity in which Rakotondrainy grew up developed her desire to discover, question, and understand the notions of identity and identity construction. This desire to understand the points of friction that arise when one has to deal with several different reference systems comes from the fact that they are sometimes paradoxical but remain entirely true. Having a reference plan is necessary to construct identity because it allows a grid of reading to place ourselves with the other and perceive the world. However, when there are several, this process becomes more complicated to grasp. It then becomes less obvious to appropriate them. 

When we examine the long process of identity construction, we realize that it is necessary to deconstruct, understand all the components that reveal themselves to us, explore them to accept them, and thus give existence to our world. The figures Rakotondrainy paints are destructured, cut out, depersonalized, and reorganized. The work creates and appreciates a new complex subject, ambiguous but tending towards uniqueness. Rakotondrainy expresses this uniqueness by blended delimitations; the borders of the faces are no longer as visible as in a single-face portrait. 

The presence of water supports an idea of fluidity between disparate elements such as our former self and our present self or our different cultures. In the book "Les Identités Meurtrières" (In the Name of Identity), Amin Maalouf shows that identity is not compartmentalized; it is not divided either by halves or by thirds, or by compartmentalized ranges. Not one part of our identity prevails over the others; they cohabit together and shape what we are and what we become. From the moment this multiplicity is unified or gathered, we go beyond the idea that identity is an assembly of parts that are foreign to each other, that they are not delimited, and that together they form a new essence, unique in its diversity. Therefore, the construction of identity is a fluid and perpetual movement like a river; nothing seems to remain fixed.