Each year, the Biennale d’Issy-les-Moulineaux showcases emerging artists alongside established names. For its fifteenth edition, it has chosen the theme of dreams, under the title “Dreams have their reasons”, inspired by William Shakespeare’s famous phrase: “We are the stuff our dreams are made of…”. 1, it welcomes Katia Bourdarel, a painter representing the new French figuration whose work has troubled us.
Entitled Narcissus #3, this painting, part of a series produced in oil on canvas in 2018, confronts us with an improbable scene that is all the more disturbing because it is painted with a meticulous realism that, from a distance, can seem almost photographic. In the centre of an empty room, as if riveted to a table serving as a pedestal, we see a nude, statue-like body, half-folded, surrounded by a scarlet-red drape that wraps around her waist like a corolla. Flower-woman prisoner or offering, she has no face, since her entire upper body is wrapped in another mauve drape tied with a red ribbon…
Constrained body, statuesque body or efflorescent body? Evoking imprisonment as much as metamorphosis, the cocoon as much as the chrysalis, this statuesque, turbaned body contemplates – blindly, however – its reflection in the mirror facing it. A strange mirror that doesn’t reflect what it should – we’re reminded of Magritte’s Forbidden Reproduction, showing a man with his back to the mirror, looking at his reflection from behind…
MIRAGES
Indeed, on the double mirror facing the model, appear leaves and pieces of anthurium spathes, those large red chalice-shaped petals, absent from the piece… Another oddity: the reflected drapery is undone, more like a mask than a pack. It is here that the artist wanted to evoke the idea of transformation: while packing “allows us to question the ownership of the body”, the mask, like the mirror, refers to metamorphosis and interiority: “it is concealed, sheltered from the gaze of others that we can be free, belong and reinvent ourselves, inventing a desired or fantasised version of ourselves “2. In the same way, playing the game of the body as an object, placed on a table like a statue on a pedestal, offered to the gaze…, enables us to detach ourselves from this erotic role, this fetishisation, to access “elsewhere”, to an infinity of possibilities – represented by the mirror -, and to “interiority” – represented by the reflection of the staircase…
Katia Boudarel cultivates ambiguity by creating disturbances between the real space (here, the room) and the space of dreams and fantasies (represented by the mirrors) in order to create confusion and doubt. Constantly playing with ambivalence, she leads us into a floating space (represented by the white walls) on the edge of dream and nightmare: half-hostage, half-goddess, her model, whose very pose evokes the anthurium flower, “could well be a woman who metamorphoses into a flower”. This osmosis of the body with nature, this propagation of the plant into the human, is a recurring theme in his work, and undoubtedly the most enlightening about his practice. In addition to his “Odalisques” series (2014) and his “Songe d’une nuit d’été” (2020), “Le Printemps” (2021) perfectly illustrates this symbiosis between man and nature: a naked body stretched out on a tree trunk, in a skilful and virtuoso play of light and shadow, seems to melt into the bark. A bravura piece testifying to the inventiveness and meticulousness of the painter’s touch. A fine lesson in painting.
- in “The Tempest”, c. 1610
- Interview on September 14, 2023
Born in Marseille in 1970, Katia Bourdarel is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She is represented by Galerie Aeroplastics in Brussels and Galerie Bernhardt Bischoff in Bern.
@katiabourdarel
Biennale d’Issy-les-Moulineaux « Le Rêve a ses raisons »
French Playing Card Museum and City History Gallery
16, rue Auguste-Gervais, Issy-les-Moulineaux
Until 12 November 2023