Frédéric Léglise — China Dolls Are Not Afraid of Pink — Backslash Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 10 → October 15, 2011

For his first exhibition at the Backslash gallery, French painter Frédéric Léglise will be showing his very latest depictions of women’s bodies on glossy white backgrounds. He has increasingly focused on Asian silhouettes in recent years, particularly Chinese figures, their delicate shapes sublimated by the acid tones of their gossamer-light clothing.

Frédéric Léglise’s working process starts by photographing his female models. The artist captures an intimate sense of each model, frozen in the moment, witness to a barely-suggested nudity. The young women are sometimes self-conscious, slowly losing their inhibitions, and the artist leaves them free to act as they wish within the confines of his studio. It is these instants of spontaneity that Frédéric Léglise is looking for during the studio session, moments that he then immortalizes against his signature backgrounds. “When I’m taking photos, the models let themselves go, forget that I am there at all. The girls have to throw off their inhibitions,” he explains. Sylph-like Asian women have featured in Frédéric Léglise’s work for a number of years, but this is the first time that they have been chosen as the theme for an exhibition. The title, China dolls are not afraid of pink, has connotations deliberately chosen by the artist as a way of highlighting the childlike attitudes adopted by young Asian women of today, candidly provocative yet at times unwittingly so. Academic and critic Jill Gasparina adds that:

“Frédéric Léglise uses painting to render (…) moods that are true, yet only semi-real. The transparent pink liquidity of the body invests the images with a ghostly and sentimental dimension. Bodies float and forms are revealed against a background that is almost always white, seemingly incomplete.”

Born in 1972, Frédéric Léglise belongs to the new generation of artists focusing on a return to painting. His works have been displayed by many institutions, including the Frissiras Museum in Athens (2011 and 2005), Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen (2005) and Passage de Retz in Paris (2000). In 2012, an exhibition of his work entitled Gold will be held at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. Frédéric Léglise teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble (France).