Avec Elle, Sans Elle — Solo show de Dani Soter — Maëlle Galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 1 → May 19, 2018

Absence

For a long time I thought absence a lack
And, in my ignorance,
I mourned this lack.
Today, I no longer mourn it.
There is no lack in absence.
Absence is a presence in me.
And I feel it, white, so tight, snuggled in my arms,
That I laugh and dance and invent joyful exclamations,
Because absence, this incorporated absence,
No one can steal it from me anymore.

Avec elle, sans elle (With Her, Without Her), the title of Dani Soter’s exhibition, is inspired by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem Absence. According to the poet, absence isn’t a lack, but an «incorporated absence». Brazilian artist Dani Soter’s photographic series is born out of this mirror game. The works presented in the exhibition echo the words of Absence. The artist places traces, residue, and even refuse at the heart of her undertaking. These imprints take the form of a piece of paper, a strawberry stripped its highly erotic spadix to our view; an array of residual elements that we no longer pay attention to because they are inconsequential, futile, trivial. Dani Soter reveals that which is no longer seen. In the photo where the tip of a nipple pierces a woman’s top, the hidden becomes visible. The same can be said of the Surrealistic photo in which, clad in opaque tights, a shop dummy’s plastic leg (that we imagine to have no body, no head) cuts across the composition of the photo. In the closed world of a women’s store, padding and bra cups are bared to all. A scratch on white skin, which out of coquetry would usually be hidden, is uncovered here too, of variation on the banality of the quotidian, on the hidden, and from which an intimist narrative emerges in the viewer’s unconsciousness.

For greater freedom, Dani Soter shot this photographic series on her mobile phone. The artist abandoned herself to the wonderment that comes from surprises, from chance discoveries, unfettered by the technical and material considerations of taking photos. Technicality is secondary to discovery and instantaneity. The subjective, can be found in all things, and the artist is a revealer of this hidden beauty.

Clotilde Scordia