Farida Le Suavé & Jeremy Stigter — Chère chair — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 23 → July 27, 2019

Flesh. A connection between the body’s different parts, a connection between human beings. We are, indeed, all made of flesh: tender flesh, soft flesh, toned. Masses of flesh, young, fresh flesh, old, flaccid flesh, at every stage, flesh lives, vibrates, full of palpitations… Flesh exists beyond the beat of the heart.

A source of passion, obsession, fascination, terror — its quantity, its shape and other characteristics, flesh is with us, always, in all its various manifestations. As our primary topography, it awakens us and it’s intense presence never ceases to ‘tickle’ our curiosity, our senses, and in our wanderings connects, allowing for a sense of communion as well as transcendence. Sometimes flesh is only pain, disgust, loathing. Chère chair (Dear Flesh — Fabulous Flesh) sets out examine, to scrutinize this matter that makes us who we are. Farida Le Suavé’s sculptures are both ambiguous and dynamic: full of desire, languorous at times, closed on themselves and in flight at others… As for Jeremy Stigter’s photographs, if the camera’s lens appears painfully close, its subject, the female figure, seems strangely distant; a vague sense of derision lends an odd touch to the display of so much flesh. Luminous shapes, profound obscurities, suggestive, even delicious, shadows… The eye is puzzled, not quite sure what it beholds.

Farida Le Suavé’s sculptures breathe. Inevitably, their very skin colour and softness of touch provoke associations with the body, with things organic and sometimes bring to mind a receptacle — the body as a vessel with orifices appearing here and there. Strata of ‘flesh’, of clay, rise up like an amorphous embryo would, multiplying from almost-nothing. The shapes thus created are generous, toned, wrinkled — carried by a breath, even out of breath, barely standing… These artworks present flesh as a territory, as something quite apart, an identity that is independent, autonomous. The work is all too human as it incarnates contradictions, from caress to destruction, from flesh as a playground, a place of comfort, to flesh abandoned, reduced to nothing more than a cry of despair. Looking for other flesh (Enlacé, 2019 — Embraced/Intertwined, 2019) or a vehicle that activates impenetrable links between micro- and macro-cosmos (Coup de foudre, 2019 — (Love at first sight/Flash of lighting, 2019), in Farida Le Suavé’s works the flesh also strongly expresses the indeed very complex register of desire, as in Deux pots (Two pots) (2005) a paraphrase of Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo.

Farida Le Suave, Coup de foudre, 2019 Ceramics, wood and flowered twill — 43 × 37 × 36 cm and 37 × 42 × 57 cm — one piece Courtesy Farida Le Suavé & Galerie Maria Lund

Fragments, “bits and pieces”… Jeremy Stigter has bent, unbent, literally hovered over the female body. As a somewhat mischievous observer, he appears to have resisted the temptation to emphasize his subject’s evident sensuality. He went, and takes us, on a visual adventure, offering visions of near abstraction where light appears as much the subject as the female anatomy it illuminates. Thus, bright flesh stands out, removed momentarily from the anonymous darkness that surrounds it. This series of silver prints prosaically titled Quelques nus (Some nudes), demands attention, to look well — eventually only to get lost in the image.

The series Cafouillages (Disorder), on the other hand, appears more frontal and direct. In an ordinary lighting, the photographer shows a naked man, quite identical to his own, standing upright in a room: the body poses, playful, at ease, quite theatrical. A man is looking at a man, acts him out, or maybe it’s the other way round…

Surfaces appear up close. Fragments of a body: a a hip, another hip, a chest, a glimmer of a face superimposed. Is it rubbish, or refinement? Discovery or statement of fact, a confirmation of being? Can we see ourselves merely as flesh?

Jeremy Stigter, Cafouillages 06 — Disorder 06, 1993 Photo, silverprint — 25 × 20 cm Jeremy Stigter & Galerie Maria Lund