Cailles blanches, grisettes et aigrettes noires. Natacha Lesueur and Anita Gauran.
Cailles blanches, grisettes et aigrettes noires. Natacha Lesueur and Anita Gauran. Natacha Lesueur and her guest artist Anita Gauran Exhibition from 10 March to 30 May 2015. Download the press kit for the exhibition The exhibition “Cailles blanches, grisettes et aigrettes noires” develops Natacha Lesueur’s investigations into the representation of the human figure, and more particularly the female figure. The artist pursues her explorations of gendered appearance, of the atavistic façades we desire or are compelled to display. Through interventions on distinctive identity markers, hair and clothing envelopes, vehicles and symbols of the masquerades of femininity, Natacha Lesueur seeks to reveal the manifestations of a social and cultural constraint: imprints in the skin of the painful constraint of a garment, organic lesions applied to the hairstyles of the 1950s to 1970s, those of our mothers and grandmothers, etc. “Cailles blanches, grisettes et aigrettes noires” is constructed as a mirror of the exhibition “Exotic Tragédie” at the Galerie municipale de la Marine in Nice, where the photographic and sculptural work based on the figure of the actress Carmen Miranda makes wide use of colour. At the Galerie Eva Vautier, the artist has chosen, on the contrary, to emphasise a kind of achromy in her representations. At once an economy of means allowing a power of concentration and densification on the subjects, black and white also confers this character of a root memory, and coincides with the will to a retrospective treatment of outdated and foundational representations. The statuary effects, sometimes reinforced by white body make-up in relation to the whiteness of stone, contribute to a sculptural vision of bodies, bringing out the constructed and normative character of female stereotypes. The achromy underlines the close and recurring link in Natacha Lesueur’s work between sculpture and photography. This relationship is manifest in both exhibitions, particularly in her recent ceramic vase-head productions. At Eva Vautier’s suggestion, Natacha chose to invite Anita Gauran to accompany her, whom she met at the Beaux-Arts de Rennes during the studies she pursued there until 2013. Under aspects that may seem stripped-down, even fragile, Anita develops a complex, rich and subtle body of work. These works question the relations that art, and archaeology in particular, may maintain with anthropology. Borrowing plastic vocabularies from the disciplines she explores (different techniques of imprints, for example), she collects, assembles and reveals the permanence, but also the recycling, of ancient forms and gestures in the present time. Exhibition “Exotic Tragédie”, Galerie de la Marine Galerie de la Marine: NATACHA LESUEUR “EXOTIC TRAGÉDIE” opening on Friday 27 February 2015 at 7 pm Exhibition from 28 February to 31 May 2015
