La femme d’à côté — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 25 → February 22, 2014

La Femme d’à côté — Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire Avec « La Femme d’à côté », la galerie Les Filles du Calvaire propose une fois de plus une exposition audacieuse servie par une tra... 2 - Bien Critique

This exhibition evokes a theatre where women play all the possible roles from the direction through the action itself. The stage varies: the interior of a bourgeois villa, the rooms of an abandoned house where stories seep out of walls and furniture, or within an artist’s or a photographer’s studio. Those women-heroines act in the shadows of streets lined with buildings, trees or a river bed.

The tone alludes to tragedies. But the end of the story remains in suspense and the interpretation open to the viewer’s own appreciation. Here, heroines don’t yield to the temptation that consumes Mathilde, the leading figure in Truffaut’s movie. They’re driven by the same blast as the artists that create them: without whose gaze or gesture, they could as well have stayed off-stage, aside, next door.

If the scenery and stories change from one piece to the other, every single one develops — on its own or in an ensemble — the portrait of a specific woman. Be it faint or loud, smooth or squeaky, imperceptible or deafening, a female voice emerges, a face appears, and a woman is embodied in the artwork. What this woman decries (be she real or imaginary) is translated by this other woman: the artist. In this echo chamber, a woman appears next to another and their respective stories — lived or imagined — resonate with each other.

Favoring feminine subjects, these artists speak of themselves as well as of long-standing patterns. Some start their work by a re-enactment of characters they know and whose references can be artistic (pictorial, literary or cinematic) as well as popular, while others pick anonymous ones, deliberately chosen amongst their relatives.