Valerie Favre
17 Jan - 01 Mar 2008
VALERIE FAVRE
"COMA"
Valérie Favre’s pictures are like an ongoing narrative, picking up various strands
of the plot at different times to drop them again later. Her first solo show at
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff also marks a ‘first’ with respect to her work – the
beginning of her new series: Redescriptions. The title stands for the idea that all
ascribed meanings can be deconstructed and shifted again. Favre’s large-scale
pictures do not claim any autonomy, but programmatically draw on well-known
images from art history to develop them into a mirror of what goes on in the
world today.
What connects the different pieces shown at the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff is the
vulnerability of the human body, which culminates in the show’s title Coma. In
two provoking parodies, the artist re-stages Rembrandt’s Descent from the cross
(1634) in the present. Her redescription of this core scene of the Christian faith -
the real death of the incarnate son of God – replaces the picture’s original
religious cast with a group of ‘Funkenmariechen’ / Majorettes – women dressed
up as soldiers to perform during carnival parades: the sexualised female
counterpart to the male soldier. In a second version, Christ is surrounded by
mythical creatures such as centaurs, fauns and satyrs. Prominently displayed
above the scene, Hecate, the three-headed goddess of magic, embodies a critic
of the church as the inquisitor of mythology.
The triptych La Volière further attests to her fondness of hybrids between human
and beast: next to a destroyed birdcage, two fauns are lying on the ground. The
somber scenario appears to be a reference to the US high-security prison at
Guantánamo. The artist uses the spatial composition to achieve a collective
mental state, placing the viewer within the torture chamber they are seeing.
Favre’s well-known motive, ‘Eagle with the Yellow Glove’, crops up again, too. It
represents freedom, in a double sense, by virtue of having escaped from the
cage, and as an emblem of power, pride and militarism. Yet, its wings have been
clipped and one of the fauns has to prop it up with his glove. Or is he, in fact,
holding it down?
A painting from the Eagle Series, The Prayer, completes the triptych in the
exhibition. Here the bird is crouching on a carpet, impeded by the big yellow
glove on its wing. Functioning as both help and hindrance, this piece of clothing
becomes, for Favre, a metaphor for the ambivalence of human action: a glove
can always be turned inside out. Freedom and oppression have come to be
embodied by the same symbols.
Coma refers to an intermediate state between – in the case of the Jesus figure
in Redescriptions – death and resurrection, and, in La Volière, the legal grey
area of Guantánamo. Nonetheless, Favre’s pictures present us with a glimmer of
hope: as long as we are in a coma, there is still the possibility that we might
wake up and overcome our fear-driven paralysis. This possibility is, after all,
what inspires the longing for dreams and fantasies, which Valérie Favre strives
to reanimate throughout her whole oeuvre. Coma is an open attack on this state
of social resignation. Her choice of the anachronistic medium of painting is a
conscious one – the physicality of the fight against its resistance reinforces her
conceptual statements. But in all this, the question she asks is quite simple:
where do we as human beings stand? Are we all prisoners of our repressive
times?
Also presented in the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff: Favre’s Shortcuts series. Painting in
in CinemaScopeFormat, they reinforce their reference to cinematographic
narrative. In the exhibition, they take the role of film excerpts. Even though
some fragments draw on plot lines of narratives from the large canvases, they
nonetheless break out of any seriality: hinting at stories that are never told to
the end.
"COMA"
Valérie Favre’s pictures are like an ongoing narrative, picking up various strands
of the plot at different times to drop them again later. Her first solo show at
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff also marks a ‘first’ with respect to her work – the
beginning of her new series: Redescriptions. The title stands for the idea that all
ascribed meanings can be deconstructed and shifted again. Favre’s large-scale
pictures do not claim any autonomy, but programmatically draw on well-known
images from art history to develop them into a mirror of what goes on in the
world today.
What connects the different pieces shown at the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff is the
vulnerability of the human body, which culminates in the show’s title Coma. In
two provoking parodies, the artist re-stages Rembrandt’s Descent from the cross
(1634) in the present. Her redescription of this core scene of the Christian faith -
the real death of the incarnate son of God – replaces the picture’s original
religious cast with a group of ‘Funkenmariechen’ / Majorettes – women dressed
up as soldiers to perform during carnival parades: the sexualised female
counterpart to the male soldier. In a second version, Christ is surrounded by
mythical creatures such as centaurs, fauns and satyrs. Prominently displayed
above the scene, Hecate, the three-headed goddess of magic, embodies a critic
of the church as the inquisitor of mythology.
The triptych La Volière further attests to her fondness of hybrids between human
and beast: next to a destroyed birdcage, two fauns are lying on the ground. The
somber scenario appears to be a reference to the US high-security prison at
Guantánamo. The artist uses the spatial composition to achieve a collective
mental state, placing the viewer within the torture chamber they are seeing.
Favre’s well-known motive, ‘Eagle with the Yellow Glove’, crops up again, too. It
represents freedom, in a double sense, by virtue of having escaped from the
cage, and as an emblem of power, pride and militarism. Yet, its wings have been
clipped and one of the fauns has to prop it up with his glove. Or is he, in fact,
holding it down?
A painting from the Eagle Series, The Prayer, completes the triptych in the
exhibition. Here the bird is crouching on a carpet, impeded by the big yellow
glove on its wing. Functioning as both help and hindrance, this piece of clothing
becomes, for Favre, a metaphor for the ambivalence of human action: a glove
can always be turned inside out. Freedom and oppression have come to be
embodied by the same symbols.
Coma refers to an intermediate state between – in the case of the Jesus figure
in Redescriptions – death and resurrection, and, in La Volière, the legal grey
area of Guantánamo. Nonetheless, Favre’s pictures present us with a glimmer of
hope: as long as we are in a coma, there is still the possibility that we might
wake up and overcome our fear-driven paralysis. This possibility is, after all,
what inspires the longing for dreams and fantasies, which Valérie Favre strives
to reanimate throughout her whole oeuvre. Coma is an open attack on this state
of social resignation. Her choice of the anachronistic medium of painting is a
conscious one – the physicality of the fight against its resistance reinforces her
conceptual statements. But in all this, the question she asks is quite simple:
where do we as human beings stand? Are we all prisoners of our repressive
times?
Also presented in the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff: Favre’s Shortcuts series. Painting in
in CinemaScopeFormat, they reinforce their reference to cinematographic
narrative. In the exhibition, they take the role of film excerpts. Even though
some fragments draw on plot lines of narratives from the large canvases, they
nonetheless break out of any seriality: hinting at stories that are never told to
the end.