Derrière Vénus — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 4 → December 17, 2016

In Venus’ mirror, since time immemorial, the mater and the lover have reflected themselves inside a sole face, made of intertwined life and desires. But behind this ideal mask, the other face of a murkier reality hides. Behind what is seen, behind what we think we know, accumulate the stratums of what is kept secret, retained, unsaid, invisible. Multiple face of an upsetting ambivalent identity, made of frictions, of tensions, somewhere between sensations and contradictory projections, individual desires and collective representations that have built the occidental culture.

Lidia Kostanek, Femme fontaine, 2016 Sculpture céramique — 34 × 63 cm © Lidia Kostanek

The artworks presented at Galerie Da-End, at the brink of the imaginary world and reality, lift the veil on this ambivalent vision and reveal troubling aspects of woman’s identity. The image of motherhood, source of Life, will sometimes be loaded with gloomy resonances and the ideal that it conveys, in its sacred power, will sometimes incarnate itself in a dirty muck, working against a cruder corporeal and erotic reality. Both a source of enjoyment and release, that eroticism will also become a conveyor of submission, predation, of cruelty and anxiety in ageless representations in which childhood and maturity sometimes combine.

Curator: Amélie Adamo