Aux heures les plus chaudes
Tatiana Defraine
The works produced for the exhibition at Pierre Poumet reflects the artist’s sense of
decor and colour, engaging an eroticization of female figures whose lazy flesh will be the
subject of a sophisticated voyeurism.
Languid, numb, slow and heavy, Tatiana Defraine offers the viewer a complete
inventory of women’s posture whose voluptuous indolence indulges in laziness and
lasciviousness. In a world where man is excluded, but thought as a promise in the
overabundance of creatures and the potential of visual enjoyment, the pictorial tradition
of the female model expands in a genuine hymn to delight. Titian’s, Goya’s and Gauguin’s
Venus meets lazy women of Bonnard and Vuillard through an aesthetic arrangement
that provokes desire.
Yet, desire doesn’t give itself immediately in the picture, it comes from plastic devices
that the artist install to arouse the urge to see, to touch, to feel: in small sizes canvas, the
feminine bodies made in oil pastel lies in intimate places – in the bedroom, on the bed, in
a place reserved to bath or to rest – where the viewer slip inside. Captured under the
shelter of confined spaces, the female protagonist delights in candid nudity, unveiled but
not yet offered. Hence, the observer makes the effort, by imagination or by action, to get
close to this bodies, to see for the sheer pleasure of seing what shouldn’t be seen.
This new format, similar to small private objects, follows and amplifies the body of those
women bordering the canvas. Their presence reveals intensely the extreme muddle of
sensual bodies curves, strengthened by those of objects (vases, cups, saucers, tables,
bathtubs) whose round and spherical shapes remind of maternal and fusional fantasy.
But what makes those images interesting is due to the impact they produce, more than
their content: senses are solicited by appealing flesh and feelings of moistness, heat and
abandon. Sight and touch are particularly used by the artist to kindle viewer’s urge.
Working with the purely sensitive quality of oil pastel, Tatiana celebrates make-up,
feminine pleasure and seduction. Indeed, substance of oil allows to fully develop the
sensitive and sensual extent of the image which then becomes seductive and offers itself
to the pleasure of contemplation. The feelings aroused by flesh imitation makes
perception waver between receipt and caress, giving to look few hallucinations and
apparitions : skins and hairs metaphorize sexual attributes.
Tatiana’s works would thus constitute contact surface, analogous to carnal energy: the
manner in which viewer gets in contact with the image fantastically transforms it in a
real woman. Voluptuousness in art should be taken in its original sense as Eros that
emerges from it leads to an active presence effect.
Corinne Szabo.
