Cathy
de Monchaux’s artistic language has always been rife with paradox. Immediate,
distinctive and utterly particular to her; it is both sharply-focused and
wide-reaching, extending way beyond issues of style to permeate all manner of
media from photographed landscape to recorded sound as well as the
intricately-wrought floor and wall pieces for which she is best known. A
peculiar parallel universe is conjured up, redolent with mystery and yet
instantly communicable, where forms, images and objects are both disquietingly
familiar as well as being impossible to identify. Wrong-footing is rife: what
appears to be one thing mutates into something altogether different, and just
when you think you’ve got a handle on that, it becomes something else yet
again.
The
most recent work is especially elusive. Drawings, sculpture, photographs and
found objects combine, coalesce and assume new lives of their own. Free from
category or definition, these complex hybrids hang or prop themselves against
walls or in corners, uniting to create an environment in which culture and
nature go into mutual melt down. Yet, amidst all this fluidity and
metamorphing, there has also been a definite shift in mood. A fragile calm has
descended. The atmosphere remains uneasy but held in check. De Monchaux’s modus
operandi continues to be meticulous and intricate but it is now less frenetic:
ornament has been reined-in; dusty white and cool verdigris combine to chill
out the more livid flesh tones and boundaries are blurred out by frizzy whorls
of wire. Although sexual imagery still seethes and simmers beneath the surface,
it is not so outrageously, viscerally genital, no longer so eager to bare all.
Which is
not to say that the intensity has abated, more that the focus has changed. It
is almost as if, by honing her vocabulary, De Monchaux is allowing some air
into her psychodramas. Her new series, collectively titled "Mise en
Scene" houses disparate objects in such a way that the focus is on the
site of the drama and not, as in the past, the containers themselves. These odd
pieces of found and fabricated flotsam may not be as elaborately-wrought as previous
votive pieces, but they are just as obsessively-orchestrated. Trapped behind
glass they function as propositions, snatches of poetry or music –
immortalizing and monumentalizing the insignificant and opening it up to all of
us. |
