Aux heures les plus chaudes

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.