Artist statement
The "Swimsuit series" is a pictural conversion of the surreal situations women face in society. It’s a series composed of twelve panels painted in acrylics on a collage of recycled materials. The paintings are inspired by real women’s personal stories and anecdotes as well as news articles and historical facts. These twelve women wearing only a bathing suit are the twelve months of the year, the twelve pin-ups in the calendar. They also refer to the twelve labors of Hercules, impossible tasks that need to be tackled.
They are represented only wearing a bathing suit because a bathing suit is the exact opposite of men's suit of armor, it’s a revealing little piece of fabric that can make women feel insecure for many different reasons and doesn’t offer any protection. It’s also a clear marker of women’s status in the society of their time.
The idea to refer to other work of art in the women bathing suits comes from the t-shirt marketing technique in which you display a brand or product on people clothes, they become walking billboard advertisement for the campaign. Here the women are advocating for their rights.
It’s a series about women's struggles and hardship, from pink tax to breastfeeding or body dysmorphia. Each panel represents a specific story but dialogues with the other panels, creating a kind of evolutionary timeline of the situations encountered by women.
They are painted in acrylic on a textured collage of recycled materials, to upcycle, but also to create a flat, coarse space that cannot be ignored. This contrasts with the idea of classical painting being constructed as windows of a smooth, perfect world. The structure of the background shines through the painted image, marking the female bodies with roughness and imperfection in the manner of passing life that is imprinted in the flesh. I thus offer an unambiguous look at the contemporary woman, imperfect, real and combative.
Mostly it all started with these 2 crazy pictures:
Practice/Media/Processes
My paintings always start with multiple layers of used paper of all sorts; newspaper, wrapping paper, silk paper, pattern paper etc… glued together with matte medium and gesso. In between layers, using modeling paste, I print with, or leave in, all types of materials recycled and found (and always clean), like bubble wrap, a wide array of plastic mesh for lemons, garlic or potatoes, and even scrap of metals. Waste that would take years to break down and disappear in a landfill. I like to create lots of different textures on the canvas, I enjoy their rhythm and diversity. When the texturing is over but still wet I add the background colors by layering them. Using acrylic paint, I spray, drop, imprint, paint the colors on top of each other, going from opaque to transparent. While the work is drying, the colors find their place and settle in. Colors and textures embrace each other and make one. This first part of the work, completely abstract, is very liberating, like a moving meditation. When it’s dry, still using acrylic paint, I start working on the figurative part of the painting, inspired by women’s status in society. The technical process applied to this series is inspired by the presence of the water surrounding large metropolises like New York, San Francisco or Amsterdam and the issues raised by the pollution produced by these cities.