Claudia Huidobro

Born in Paris in 1963
She lives and works in Paris, France

Claudia Huidobro – “Douce-amère”

Like a piece of embroidered lace, constructed on a net in which people do not cease tugging at the threads, the work of Claudia Huidobro conjours up the breast we cannot see. Not the breast of pin-ups, objects of male fantasies, which she deflects by lacerating them in order to turn them into collages with constructivist orientations, but it remains the breast that persists when the body extends beyond the frame. Elsewhere, each limb can become a motif. A hollowed-out self-portrait will emerge in this fathomless frame.

There are parts of legs on which people stumble along, heaps of bodies and debris scattered about that inhabit the haunted and fragile world of the artist. Then one is reminded of the photographs of Hans Bellmer and his female doll mounted on legs, but also of those that Guy Bourdin lets dangle to the ground, randomly in the plush interiors.

With one exception: with Claudia Huidobro, the strangeness no longer appears via the representation of the image, but rather through the interventions that she carries out on it. In fact, by using alternately sticky tape to tear off the texture of the skin and a needle for jabbing through a muscle, it is above all because the violence of the wound she inflicts contrasts with the softness of the textures she uses. A just and faithful line that we follow by its trace; meticulous, smooth workmanship comes to counteract the aggressions perpetrated on this flesh that has become matter, and which the artist is pleased to abuse.

From graphics to video, all the effects supported by the medium must contribute to the emergence of a handwriting that becomes a sign. In a concern for economy of means, using whatever is to hand, whether that hand is armed or not*. In this tenuous link, where ambivalence holds sway, the artist’s body seems to fight its way through the changing geometries it creates. In a desperate search for the roots that must be retained within it, reconstituted into a hybrid self or in the features of a menacing sculpture, this self is seeking balance, and oscillating ritually from the terrible to the jubilant.

The series “Tout contre” presented here, marks a break. Through photography, the artist explores the body pushing back its own limits. The cramped nature of the place and its disproportions contributes to making these gestures, simultaneously wide-reaching and turned in on themselves, more impressive than they seem. And it is indeed by spreading out within the interior of this box, oscillating between appearing and disappearing, that identity is made flesh.

Thus leaving us in a latent ambiguity, no longer knowing whether it is the hand of the angel or that of the demon that has come to overtake its predecessor.

(Source : Fanny Lambert)