About Muriel Rodolosse
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Artpress N° 325 July and August 2006, article of Lise Ott, page 90
For twenty years now, Muriel Rodolosse has been developing in painting, in photography and during performances, a demanding work where her drastic propositions question the limits of the classification of genres between humankind, the animal and the plant kingdoms. Under the generic title “No taxonomy”, the set of eight recent paintings (2005-2006) that she exhibits in Montpellier, reveals that the questioning continues within the language, in the figures of hybridization that the artist propose, as well as in the references to foreign mythologies, most often South-American, whose universality of symbols blur the track of stereotyped interpretation.
The meaning is constructed by the visitor within the vertigo produced by different factors: hyper-acuteness and sensuality of the allusions in the details (a scorpion, a fly, a lady’s slipper, the silky blur of the porosity…); masked characters with inverted or indistinct sexes, sometimes aiming at confusing the differences between male and female into a gemellary, if not Siamese, composition, repeated attempts at breaking erotic conventions, in usual assembling between the human and the animal (the woman and the rabbit, the sex and the sting, for example); similar propositions as far as animals go (innocent and spattered lambs, whose black-ringed eyes sometimes shoot the look of a disquieting predator); a permanent swing between the interior and the exterior (the underneath and the above of the skin or of the carnal and of the plant envelopes); the situation of the figures, at lost, in a pregnant universe, which is at the time made completely unreal –a milk-whitish background, almost dazzling, occupying most of the space and marshy (aquatic forests, bottomless grounds, of which the figure emerges like an apparition).
There is a vague threat to all this: far from having the magical scope of shamanism, the masks, whether vegetal or animal, favour the perception of an ambiguous grotesque between the gentleness, the violence and the fixedness of the look, which perturbs the idea of a blissful eroticism.
This work has often been associated with the “metamorphoses” by Ovide, who is yet, a learned poet whose work is rooted in metaphorical conventions of the Imperial era. We will rather, owing to the unbridled obscenity and sexuality that go with it, associate it with the “Golden Donkey” by Apulia. Muriel Rodolosse’s paintings are strongly dreamlike and play on hybridization, to give birth to a fragmentary and conscious story (all the compositions are realized on Plexiglas, on the back of the support, starting by the end.
So Muriel Rodolosse’s works suggest, at any rate, the desire of conjuring up a sexuality without pre-established frontiers, without any time or space or genre, the culminating point of which lies in an indeed finite picture, but a picture that is always conceived like a countdown. A sexuality that calls for the recognition of an orgasm released from archetypes.
Lise Ot
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