The Resistance, 2023
All that’s left of the face is the lower profile: a closed mouth and chin hanging from a taut neck adorned with a silver collar on the body, also truncated, all that remains is the bust and groin adorned with a sequined bodice and satin panties.
It takes audacity and talent to dare to paint a truncated full-length portrait in tight framing, over two metres high to boot. Born in Sweden in 1983 and a graduate of the Royal School of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sara-Vide Ericson – who is having her first solo show in France at the Swedish Institute – has both. Blending highly textured areas with those where the canvas is almost left bare, her portraits and landscapes are a testimony to her masterful and original use of materials. Not hesitating to mix blood and horsehair with the paint, she uses pastry bags to apply the raw paint in thick threads, giving her canvases a sculptural texture that is visible when you get close.In all her works, we are struck by the subtlety of the impasto: far from the flatness of many of today’s figurative paintings, everything vibrates and sparkles in her canvases: here, the glitter of the still waters of a marsh, here, that of a wild horse’s coat, and, in our disturbing portrait, that of sequins and satin. But it’s not just these subtle material effects that give this painting its strength and bewitching power. It’s also the no less subtle use of out-of-frame and monumentality, of enlargement, which turns the canvas into a surface of projection and identification for the viewer. That’s where the mystery lies…
“SARA-VIDE ERICSON – Desire of the tail”
Until February 18
Swedish Institute
11, rue Payenne, Paris III