Born in 1967, Frédérique Nalbandian lives and works in Menton and Nice, between France and Italy.
Born in 1967, Frédérique Nalbandian lives and works in Menton and Nice, between France and Italy. A sculptor and draughtsperson, she works with Marseille soap and plaster, combined with water, for a body of work on time, the living and memory. Her works are held in the collections of the Frac Sud, the musée Gassendi (Digne-les-Bains) and the musée du Pavillon de Vendôme (Aix-en-Provence). It is commonly thought of obscenity as a more or less bearable relationship between an aesthetic subject and the realistic representation of sexual activity, because it is assumed that the absence of metaphor or of a fig leaf causes the unbearable, and the fascination that sometimes feeds on it in the subject. However, it seems to me that obscenity can also arise from sexual metaphors, in which case it stems from the disproportion between the representations of things that figure sex and the feeling by which the subject disavows this figuration; like a piston mechanism dressed in a melancholy air, or the play of a sphincter commanding the opening of the most virginal smile. The first kind of obscenity tends towards pornography, the second towards oxymoron or antithesis; but in both cases one notes that obscenity consists in some disagreement between the percept and the affect, rather than in the mere depiction of carnal eros.
