Stephanie Pryor: How to deal with wild animals and classical artists – By Aude Milaguet

In the CRG Gallery an exhibition from the young but talented artist Stephanie Pryor is on view until the beginning of May.

Stephanie Pryor: How to deal with wild animals and classical artists

By Aude Milaguet

 

 

 

 

 

In the CRG Gallery an exhibition from the young but talented artist Stephanie Pryor is on view until the beginning of May. I came to the gallery without knowing who was exhibiting, but when I saw the paintings I knew that it was a great idea to go there. I was very impressed by Pryor’s deep work.

More than just basic figurative paintings, she seems willing to show the dark side of our superficiality. Indeed, the exhibition sets up two kinds of the painter’s work: some paintings about animals with some others about dancers or opera singers.

And this is the point. By this bizarre association you can’t stay insensitive to the work; you can’t just look at it as if you couldn’t be involved. Everybody can feel a part of what she wants us to understand.

Stephanie Pryor shows us the animals in a very wild way. They are not cute or touching. They are simply described as they live. Because Pryor only paints wild animals, and not pets, you see foxes, eagles, lions, wolves, bears…fighting to eat, roaring, fixing their territory…She doesn’t point out the nice side of their life but instead focuses on what can disturb the audience, all the bad things which are usually hidden. And she does that not to emphasize the awkward side of the animals’ life but to show their real behavior.

This is even more amplified by the proximity of paintings of people. The dancers, the opera singers are almost always painted in a dark background showing the loneliness of the ballet dancer, the tragic moment that the opera singers experiences. Is it to show how art can be superficial besides the animals’ life that Pryor’s only paints artists during their performance?

This exhibition manages superbly to make us think about how different the art world can be from the "animal’s world." Despite this apparent paradox, Pryor demonstrates that these two worlds are not so different: if the animals can appear being violent, living in savagery, the human beings are not so far from this dark facet. It’s just that we have to look more objectively and deeply at what we find first beautiful.