Exhibiting alongside established and emerging artists, the Issy-les-Moulineaux Biennale offers opportunities for discovery each year. Having chosen for its 15th editione The edition explores the theme of dreams, under the title "Dreams Have Their Reasons," inspired by William Shakespeare's famous line, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." 1… », the event notably welcomes Katia Bourdarel, a painter representing the new French figuration whose work has disturbed us.
entitled Narcissus #3This painting, from a series created in oil on canvas in 2018, confronts us with an improbable scene, all the more unsettling for its meticulous detail and realism, which, from a distance, can appear almost photographic. In the center of an empty room, as if riveted to a table serving as a pedestal, we see a nude, statue-like body, half-folded, surrounded by a scarlet drape that wraps around its waist like a corolla. A woman-flower, either captive or offered, she has no face, since her entire upper body is enveloped in another mauve drape tied with a red ribbon…
Constrained body, petrified body, or body in bloom?... Evoking both imprisonment and metamorphosis, the cocoon and the chrysalis, this petrified and turbaned body contemplates—blindly, however—its reflection in the mirror facing it. A strange mirror that does not reflect what it should reflect—and one thinks of Reproduction prohibited Magritte's work showing a man from behind looking in a mirror at his reflection from behind…
Mirages
Indeed, on the double mirror placed opposite the model, anthurium leaves and fragments of spathes appear—those large, red, calyx-shaped petals absent from the actual piece… Another strange detail: the reflected drapery is undone, more like a mask than a bundle. It is here that the artist sought to evoke the idea of transformation: while the bundle “allows us to question the ownership of the body,” the mask, like the mirror, refers to metamorphosis and interiority. "It is in secrecy, hidden from the gaze of others, that one can be free, belong to oneself and reinvent oneself, invent a desired or fantasized version of oneself."2" Similarly, playing the game of the objectified body, placed on a table like a statue on a pedestal, offered to the gaze…, allows one to detach oneself from this erotic role, from this fetishization, to access “an elsewhere”, an infinity of possibilities – represented by the mirror –, and “interiority” – represented by the reflection of the staircase…
With a penchant for creating disturbances between real space (here, the room) and the space of dreams and fantasies (represented by the mirrors) in order to generate confusion and doubt, Katia Bourdarel cultivates ambiguity. Constantly playing with ambivalences, she leads us into a floating space (symbolized by the white walls) on the border between dream and nightmare: part hostage, part goddess, her model, whose very pose evokes the anthurium flower, "could well be a woman who metamorphoses into a flower." This osmosis of bodies with nature, this propagation of the plant to the human, is, moreover, a recurring theme in her work, and undoubtedly the most illuminating aspect of her practice. In addition to her series of odalisques (2014) or its Dream of a summer night (2020) Spring (2021) perfectly illustrates this symbiosis between man and nature: a naked body stretched out on a tree trunk, in a skillful and virtuosic interplay of light and shadow, seems to melt into the bark. A tour de force attesting to the inventiveness and meticulousness of the painter's touch. A beautiful lesson in painting.
- in The Tempestc. 1610
- Interview conducted on September 14, 2023
Born in Marseille in 1970, Katia Bourdarel is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. She is represented by the Aeroplastics Gallery in Brussels and the Bernhard Bischoff Gallery in Bern.
@katiabourdarel
Issy-les-Moulineaux Biennial "The Dream Has Its Reasons"
French Playing Card Museum and City History Gallery
16, rue Auguste-Gervais, Issy-les-Moulineaux
Until November 12, 2023
biennaledissy.com
