Unfocused Beauty
Richard Dailey
When art gets in bed with fashion, it’s often worth watching just for what each reveals about the other. Cecilia Jurado, a young Peruvian artist living in NYC, gives this ménage an obliquely seductive treatment with her recent photographs and specially made chocolate bars in two European shows. This new work appeared first in the fall of 2005 at the Galleria Punt in Samedan/St. Moritz, Switzerland; the same show (with an important addition) opens in Paris at the Port Autonome gallery this spring (May 11-June 11).
Cecilia’s primary tool is her camera. Here she has photographed 25 models at fashion shows in NYC. The images are alluring and disquieting in equal measure, close-ups of faces in baroque gilt frames (40 X 30 cm & 20 X 15 cm). There is something painterly about them, enhanced by the frames of course, as if Goya were back with a camera this time. These are rich, textural images that shimmer between the grotesque and the sublime. They are sexy and confrontational.
The chocolate bars that the artist has produced with her images on the packaging bring our experience of her work into another dimension and associate it with taste and internalization. The chocolate bars are both sold and, in a smaller format, distributed freely in stores, at parties and at the gallery before, during and after the show. Chocolate is the perfect embodiment of consumption here: stimulating deluxe comfort food, good (like shopping?) for depression, easy to overdose on. You may think of the wrapped hard candies that Felix Gonzales-Torres spread everywhere on gallery floors, but Cecilia is concerned with other issues than the viral propagation that Gonzales-Torres wanted us to experience tactilely. She uses her camera and her chocolates in tandem to destabilize our experience of fashion and art and taste, exploring the superficiality of meaning and the meaning of superficiality in part by inviting the viewer to imagine just how those girls would taste. Your eyes can fool you, but not your tongue.
By social association we internalize fashion’s icons. But the glossy, superficial ideals of beauty that the fashion industry moguls want the public to swallow whole often just aren’t enough for art directors raised on the milk of the chic-and-shock cash cow. Art is still capable of conferring an aura of individualism in the essentially mass-market business of fashion. Jurado’s work, though, moves us beyond a simplistic analysis of art and fashion using each other in a cynically reciprocal folie à plusieurs. Some artists who deal with fashion are concerned with issues of branding and image; Tom Sachs, for example, destabilizes brands by making, say, a Prada concentration camp or a Hermés guillotine. Other artists, such as Vanessa Beecroft, are involved with the female body and its representations in fashion. Cecilia Jurado’s work, while inherently dealing with both of these concerns, is focused more on the experience of the viewer qua artist: the viewer as the individual nexus and focus of fashion, not its victim but its Duchampian complement.
For her show at the Porte Autonome gallery in Paris, Cecilia’s photographs, as well as being displayed inside, will be printed on acrylics (in a larger format: 110 x 82.5 cm) and hung outside on the rue des Jardins St. Paul in the Marais. This significant addition amplifies and extends the show’s impact while giving a sequential visual twist to Cecilia’s images. Outside they have lost their gilt frames and function as both advertising for the show inside the gallery and as meta-commentary on advertising as a critical element in the fashion equation. For the opening there will also be a performance involving a fashion model and chocolate.
Cecilia’s purposefully unfocused and doctored images have a subtle, corrosive effect on ideals of beauty, playfully working away at received iconography in a way that doubles back and makes us aware of our desire as the only constant in the fashion equation. This young Peruvian artist has an intuitive control over her material that reminds us just how liberating a camera can be in the right hands. And if you can’t afford a photo, pick up a few bars of chocolate. I’ve got two Oral Cuties in my fridge right now, one milk and one dark chocolate, mouth-watering food for thought.
