| This is a piece of work that focuses on women, on how they are represented in classical art, indeed on the “codes” that surround and determine their representation, from the Renaissance to today. I chose to observe the backgrounds that encase, and to some extent determine, the way women are portrayed, from a Florentine countryside to the overwrought interior of a painter’s studio. These portraits reveal more than they intend—they reveal a great deal about the social position of a woman, from the way she is appareled and coiffed to the attitude she is made to strike. In this series of pictures on Femmes d’intérieur, I want to play with the codes, to re-arrange them—giving a cushion or a chair or a pair of shoes the same attention as the subject. |  |
Elene Usdin
This is a piece of work that focuses on women, on how they are represented in classical art, indeed on the “codes” that surround and determine their representation, from the Renaissance to today. I chose to observe the backgrounds that encase, and to some extent determine, the way women are portrayed, from a Florentine countryside to the overwrought interior of a painter’s studio. These portraits reveal more than they intend—they reveal a great deal about the social position of a woman, from the way she is appareled and coiffed to the attitude she is made to strike.
In this series of pictures on Femmes d’intérieur, I want to play with the codes, to re-arrange them—giving a cushion or a chair or a pair of shoes the same attention as the subject. It’s my way of depersonalizing the woman, of turning her into (perhaps what she always was): the object, the woman-object. Upending things in effect poses the question: what is the social status of a woman? The reference to “great classics” of painting is a good way to illustrate how a woman is corseted by her rank and the social position of her husband or her own family. The idea of painting “in the style of”—copying the classics—is a way of making each photograph unique. It’s an additional way of personifying each of these women, of giving them back their difference and their originality.
In this series, as in my work in general, I like to transform reality into a game. By changing the realities that surround us, the artist (or anyone) becomes a kind of visionary of a comic and playful world. To me, that approaches poetry; words become objects, the “furniture” of an interior that reassembles in a new way, creating a new order, a new metaphor.
To speak of just one of these photographs—the portrait of Georges—is the one of Georges Sand, the writer, who in her own era deconstructed the codes corseting women. I have chosen to repaint the famous portrait of her by Charpentier, which shows Sand with an amused smile. In my vision, she is inviting the viewer to sit down on her—she is the woman-chair. But attention: on the armrest there lurks an aggressive barracuda that reverses the notion of the submissive woman. A kick in the nose to what society once expected of women. And today, is their independence so much more meaningful?
