Born in France in 1946, Kirili  came of age amidst the beginnings of post-war French critical thought. The influence of Roland Barthes is particularly evident in the emphasis he has always placed in semiotics and their manifestation in the body. This had been his impetus to study Chinese calligraphy, Hebrew script and the iconography of global cultures. The embodiment of language as sensation and as a sensual experience is, according to Kirili, communicated through working with the hand. “It’s something I refuse to surrender, it’s in my DNA.”

I met with Kirilli in the Tribeca loft he has shared since 1980 with his wife, the artist Ariane Lopez-Huici. We are looking together at his new works on paper, massed on the wall flanking metal sculptures set against colored grounds. The organic lines in the paper pieces are open to multiple readings, as script, brushstroke or some other kind of signifier that references Kirili’s own sculptural forms. They exude confident improvisation. They also bring to mind the late cutouts by Matisse in the way color operates as light. Another ongoing new series functions equally on the wall or on the floor. These are elongated, vertical rectangles of several sheets of newspaper taped together and then intersected in the center by a thin, single “zip,” sliced, pinned, and draped from the center.  Placement, displacement, materiality and references to Barnett Newman reframe these ephemeral remnants from The New York Times. They are physically light, seemingly instantaneous and undulating with the slightest breeze.

ALAIN KIRILI
My life as an artist is an antidote to what I should have become. Kirili is a pseudonym. I left the conventional expectations of my family and chose to become an artist. The creative process for me has always been sacrosanct, I’ve devoted my life to it, and now it is how I stand up to the current negativity of my body. I have bone marrow cancer and am undergoing various treatments. I never know when one will succeed. I confront this negativity with the joy of creation, this is deeply ingrained in my identity. The illness is a new experience for me. Until now, my body has always been a great source of joy and inspiration.

MARY JONES
It’s no wonder that you’ve found a kindred spirit in the late work of Matisse, who having survived his successful surgery for cancer in 1941, felt he had been given a second life and consequently invented the cutouts.   

The new work is a good sign that I want to survive. So, I’m an heir of Matisse’s second life, because when I came out of the hospital I was starving to create, and to challenge any form of negativity. I’ve worked intensely to achieve a celebration of life in this new body of work.

We are now quite used to seeing a field or rectangle of painted color behind your large sculptural works. I’m reminded of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory about the “container and contained.” There’s an interplay between the painted space and the sculptural object. They seem at once to have emerged from that space but also to be extending from it or attached. At times the colored rectangle functions as a base or pedestal. The tension is closer here, as the contrast between materials has narrowed, the color relationships advance. Is this partly due to your renewed admiration for Matisse?

Yes, the fresh, direct perception of color and shape is very new in these works, and there is a specific link to Matisse, to his book “Jazz” and to the “Matisse Chapel,” the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Ariane and I have attended mass there several times and it has always been very stimulating for me. Of course, I’ve admired the colors of the stained glass, but also the very rich collection of chasubles that he created. The young priest Father Paul Anel even did a mass in honor of Ariane and me wearing a striking chasuble. With that in mind, I’ve been studying the symbolism of colors in religious art in the well-known book by René Gilles, “Le symbolisme dans l’art religieux” (1961). It is crucial to understand that color in a church always has a profound symbolic dimension. I’m choosing and mixing beautiful, resonant colors with specific, ascribed spiritual attributes. There’s a dialectic between the formality and symbolism of the color and the organic aspect of the line, a powerful tension that I like to explore.

The “zips” of your newspaper pieces have a similar armature to the paintings of Barnett Newman, who was a formative influence for you. How do you feel the sensual and the spiritual are resolved in his work? 

The paintings of Newman are fire. Barnett Newman gave us one of the most beautiful titles for a work of art in the in 20th century art. “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”  It means “Man,” but also “the phallus.”  The spiritual world of Newman is really burning with passion. I think of him as a source of white fire. His first sculptures, “Here I” (1950) and “Here II” (1965) were so important for me. I found them extraordinary. They were not anthropomorphic or architectonic. The only thing left was a presence. The quest for presence is something that has been with me from the beginning and I was happy to discover that in Newman. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Tom Hess about him, and to discuss the Talmudic presence in Newman’s work. But I also have a great love and respect for de Kooning, in part because he made one of the most beautiful quotes imaginable, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”  De Kooning and Newman stand very close to my heart and carry me, and I’d like to add something that I find very impressive, and that I feel is also very lovely. Barnett Newman did a show of “The Stations of the Cross” at the Guggenheim in 1966, and around the same time John Coltrane released “A Love Supreme.”  I’ve always loved to look at “The Stations of the Cross” in the Guggenheim catalog, listening to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

But there is another Abstract Expressionist artist who has been especially important to me, almost as if he was part of my family: David Smith. I admire his work and character for many reasons and one of them is that he was an artist born in Americawho confronted and forcefully challenged his Protestant heritage. He denounced it in many of his works, including a great one called “Puritan Landscape,” (1946).  He stood up to the Puritan traditions of this country and rose above the influences that could have destroyed or suppressed him. He protected himself by working with such dedication, making more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. I find this incredibly inspiring, and like David Smith I also take issue with all things Puritan!  This was an ongoing argument I had with Louise Bourgeois. We were friends and were very supportive of one another’s work. Although we had verticality and sexuality in common, we had completely opposite views about the Puritan attitudes in America. She loved it, and I hate it. I interviewed her for Arts Magazine [March 1989) and she told me, “Alain, you have too much empathy for the world. I love confrontation, I had a great crush on Alfred Barr, because he was a temple of Puritanism, absolutely inviolable, this challenge was part of the attraction.” So I said, “OK, Louise, I am not like you!”

You’ve studied Smith’s work extensively, visited and studied his library at Bolton Landing many times. You’ve also organized exhibitions and written about his work. But how do you see your essential differences?

A huge difference is that he is a master of the scrapyard. He had the ability to find old metal that he that he could transform through welding. There’s some blacksmithing and forging in his work, but mostly he could make and envision his work from this found raw material. Whereas in my work, I’m deeply concerned with the trace of the hand and blacksmithing. Let’s say, I’m much more of a blacksmith than David Smith. He was a welder. Today, people don’t know the beauty of blacksmithing. It is, for instance, crucial in African art and society. The blacksmith is highly respected. He is a central figure in the village, performing necessary tasks in both utilitarian and cultural ways. When I worked in Mali in 2003, I met a blacksmith among the Dogon and worked alongside him. We had a great experience together, built out of mutual respect.

Even your large metal sculptures have the directness of drawing. Your new pieces are created from drawing subtractively. Is this a new experience?

Actually, the process is almost like blacksmithing. The pleasure of blacksmithing is mysterious and sensual—to create a vibration on the surface of metal and then form a curve. It’s a way to introduce gracefulness, an expression of emotion through the marks of the hammer, or the power hammer. In my new work the signs and shapes are slightly trembling, like in blacksmithing, and like in life.

What’s trembling in blacksmithing?

The fact that you start with rigid line of metal and as you shape it, a trembling quality is created, one that takes away the rigidity.

Is there sound?  Is it percussive?

Oh, yes. You could almost shape it with the sound alone and with your eyes closed. If you beat the metal when it’s getting too cold, your ear is also getting too cold, and when it’s red hot, it’s a different sound. And that’s why a lot of music is born in blacksmithing, in the forge.  It’s very often the secret source of Flamenco.

In this new series, there’s certainly a rhythm you’ve created from piece to piece, and as a whole.

Each work can be by itself, but as an installation they become monumental through multiplicity. Monumentality has always been with me, and I’d like to show them in an environment that activates this potential fully. There’s also an “archeology” of my own work here. Recently, I did some corner pieces of an iron rod and a piece of newspaper on the floor that relate to clay pieces I did in the 1970. The recent sculpture utilizing newspaper on the floor and on the wall is revisiting some floor pieces in zinc from 1972. Wire and paper are traditionally used to give thickness to free standing sculpture before it disappears with the addition of clay or plaster.

Today for me, to show the use of paper and wire is a way to break the traditional hierarchy where only bronze is the final version of the sculpture. Now, paper and wire are revealed and are the final versions of my sculptures.

Monumentality can be thought of as imposing, formal and static, yet your work consistently involves movement, especially with the new paper pieces.

I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution.

And speaking of movements, you and Ariane have recently become US citizens. How’s that going for you?

I first arrived in 1965 and traveled back and forth several times. In France, after the second world war, the art community was destroyed. So, it was great for me to meet artists here that were close to my age, like Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, Marcia Hafif, and to go with Robert Ryman to hear jazz. There was nothing better for me than to meet living artists. I admire them, have great empathy for the difficulties they face, and for the determination of contemporary artists. Life is short, it’s urgent.

I’ve been so moved to see women emerge in the artworld, people I originally met in the 80s, like Elizabeth Murray, who was a close friend. To belong to a community is important, and to be part of an open world where women are recognized has been wonderful. The “Me Too” movement of today is something that gives me so much satisfaction, and something I never expected. It’s signaling the end of patriarchal power. It’s a revolution and it’s great. To be married to an accomplished woman artist and see that we both can achieve recognition has been very gratifying. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “In a couple there should be room for two.”

I’m not afraid of the feminine or the emotional in art, I welcome it.  I’m completely in love with Italian art and I’ve gone to Italy at least 20 times. It’s my first destination. It’s absolutely stunning what the church has allowed on its walls regarding ecstasy, it interests me very much. The lightness of being is a crucial aspect of sculpture. We speak about weight. When does a woman experience weightlessness?  When she has a climax with God!  That’s exactly what the St. Teresa of Bernini is saying!  There are Hindu temples in India where you see carvings of beautiful bodies undulating, and you begin to understand that when you bring together sexuality and spirituality, you are in masterpiece mode.

The post Lightness of Being: Alain Kirili discusses his new work with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Brenda Zlamany has long been known for exploring and revitalizing traditional portraiture. Her technique is impressively old world (Rembrandt and Holbein are cited influences) and her command of oil painting affirms serious dedication and mastery of the medium. But Zlamany’s work is decidedly contemporary in the way it questions and sometimes confounds the usual relationship between subject and artist.

This exchange is central to Zlamany’s current work, which has become more openly interactive than ever, even performative, as she paints the portrait in front of the subject as they observe her. For a project in Taiwan funded by a Fulbright grant in 2011, the artist painted 888 watercolor portraits on location, which led to 12 paintings of aboriginal teenage boys. Now, she’s taken on an equally difficult demographic: the New York art world. Her year-long project, “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” is actively underway with artists, friends, family and casual acquaintances all coming through the studio in an intricate web of connections. Each sitting is concluded with the artist taking a photograph of the subject holding his or her portrait. The photo is then posted to Facebook and Instagram, one portrait every day.

It’s become quite the phenomenon. She gets hundreds of “likes,” comments and criticism with each post and was thrown off Instagram once for a day, (see the posting of day 193). No money changes hands and the portraits remain Zlamany’s property.

And every subject entering the artist’s studio encounters the nemesis and progenitor for this project: an imposing oil painting, in progress, of seven women in 19th-century costume. This is a commissioned portrait from the Yale Women Faculty Forum, and the depicted women are the first women to receive PhDs from Yale, in 1894. The painting is set to hang in Yale’s prestigious Sterling Memorial Library.

I met with Brenda in her Williamsburg studio in late November where she lives with her 15-year-old daughter, Oona. At the time, the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” count was in the low 200s.

MARY JONES: You’ve said this project began as a way to counteract the pull and the gravitas of the Yale commissioned portrait. The women in the Yale painting are all historical, they’ve felt like ghosts, people that you’re divining or bringing to life, and you wanted some live people coming through as a counter balance.

BRENDA ZLAMANY: It’s coming along, don’t you think? I knew the Yale women were going to want a lot from me, this painting was going to take me to the depths. I needed to keep one foot out the door and a portrait-a-day project would keep me from getting over involved. It was such an injustice they weren’t painted in their lifetime that I do feel there’s a pull from these women, such a desire to be painted. I want it to seem like I know each and every one of them. I have to know them to the point that I’m dreaming about them and they’re real to me–that’s part of the technique. Most of my reference photos of the actual women aren’t very good and there’s too few of them. To create their personalities I’ve got to place them all into a certain age that’s quite different than my source photos. I have to create the color, make hairstyle adjustments and they need clothing. I have to imagine their bodies, and to do that convincingly I’ve researched and found living surrogates for each of them.

It seems like the Yale commission is very private, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project is very public. We see pictures of it every day on Facebook.

But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project has made the Yale girls public too, because everyone who sits comments on the painting and on the women. So the portrait-a-day feeds the Yale commission but it also makes me anxious. The “Watercolor Portrait a Day” is dangerous because it’s freaking Oona out, it’s hard on her to have all these people coming through the studio. She even referred to a sitter as “fucker” the other day, and these girls also would not like it to be here. So I’m struggling against different interests.

Why would the Yale women object to the “Watercolor Portrait a Day?”

I don’t want to seem like a mystical person, but you can’t help but get into these women. They want my undivided attention, and they would squeeze every ounce of painting ability out of me if they could. Things in the late 19th Century weren’t good for a lot of people, and these women had such privileged lives that you don’t have to feel sorry for them. They were educated, they traveled, but they were not welcomed by the boys at Yale. One of the reasons that I’m right for this job is that I know to get this done well I have to subjugate my ego. I’m a vehicle for them; this painting is not about me, or my art.

So is the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” about you?

It’s about relationships. In the Yale project, I might spend a whole day on a detail, like an eyebrow, trying to figure out, “Is this person thoughtful, angry, or happy?” and make all sorts of changes. But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” has rules. Among the rules are that I have to accept whatever I get and I can’t change it after the person leaves. I’m not driving it intellectually. The Yale painting is a purely intellectual pursuit. All the pistons have to be firing 100% for me to do it. If I feel distracted or tired I could lose somebody. I could lose a face, I could lose a personality. I was working on Cornelia till midnight last night, painting her and then photographing the work every hour. I kept going over the photos on the screen to see if I was losing something because I could see she was starting to come into being. I saw the glimmer of who she was going to be and it was really fragile.

But the other thing about the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” and I was talking to Alex Katz about this yesterday, is that I’m learning you can get incredible things if you let go of control. If you can see things without intellectualizing them it might be more than what you could have done if you were trying to stay in control. So it’s interesting to have one project that requires such focus and control up against this other project, which is about accepting what happens.

And you open up yourself and your home and encounter all kinds of people.

Portraits are really an intense experience and most people who come want something more than just a portrait. It can be anything, something to divulge or confess, or something to prove for so many reasons. Sometimes they have an agenda, and it can be really big. Most of the people I’ve painted are artists and they tell me about their careers, or their lack of a career, their rent, their illnesses and their fears. Do I secretly believe I have any healing powers? Maybe I do a little bit. I feel it’s important to have this kind of interaction. It’s not a product-oriented project although I like it when the portraits are good. It’s experiential, we’re sitting down and we’re trying to achieve some kind of closeness. Whatever happens on the page is the evidence of that. You never know what you’re going to get, and sometimes it’s more than you’ve bargained for and I take that into the day. It all happens in a very short time, and I have to think on so many levels and stay focused to actually make the art. I let them talk the entire time and I’ve heard a lot about people and their lives. But it’s a two-way street: I’m talking too, and confessing things, too. I find myself telling something to someone that I’ve never said before. It does create closeness, but right now I don’t know if it will last.

How do you connect to the subject’s appearance and character?

At any given moment you can choose what you want to see. Recently I painted a woman who at first looked nondescript or even plain. In fact, she came in telling me that she wasn’t attractive and that she wasn’t photogenic, either. I was really conscious that there was a side of her that could be attractive; you can go either way with anybody. I worked on the angle. I saw that her lips were full and her eye color was beautiful. Right away I could see her best lines and most attractive features and I knew that not only could I paint it but that I could photograph it, too.

I see the photographs as a collaboration, and sometimes a compromise between you and the subject. You want the portrait to look good, but your subject is also invested in having the photograph be flattering.

The photos are just as hard as the painting. Nothing is accidental. I usually take about 100 photos and they’re really careful and discussed. The photo begins with the painting. I have things I’ve learned to do, some conscious, some unconscious, to put the subject at ease. I know the problem areas and how to address them in a particular way to relax the person. They’re telling me things without knowing it. I’ m reading them and taking a lot of cues from watching their face as they’re watching me paint them. When you’re painting someone and they’re watching and judging how you see them, you also become the subject in some way.

After painting all these people, has it changed the way you judge character?

I used to hitchhike everyday after high school for fun, and that’s how I became a good judge of character. I got out of school at 1 PM and I had nothing to do so I just hitchhiked till dinnertime. You put your head in the car and you look at the person’s face. You have to decide in 10 seconds whether you’ll get into that car, if it’ll be a good conversation or whether you’ll get raped or murdered. That’s good training for portraiture.

Did your parents know?

My parents weren’t paying attention, they had an infant at home, and I was a teenager and they didn’t notice. I was invisible to my parents.

You got yourself into art school away from home at an early age, 14. How?

It came out of hitchhiking. Somehow I ended up at the home of Allan Shestack of the Yale University Art Gallery. He and his wife Nancy had some Jim Dine prints, so I showed them my drawings. They were impressed and hooked me up with the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, and the Yale College Before College Program. I hitchhiked an hour every day to New Haven to go there, and gradually I just didn’t go home.

You also got yourself to the San Francisco Art Institute for a summer when you were just 15. How did that come about?

I had a fake ID that said I was 18, and I applied with it and I got in. It was a good thing that I wasn’t on my parent’s radar at that time, they would have stood in my way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

That’s an unusual way to start. It’s also kind of unusual to see someone working today with a camera lucida. You’ve told me they’re pretty hard to find. How did you discover it?

I was in David Hockney’s studio in the late ‘80s when he got his camera lucida and Maurice Payne, his printer, also spontaneously gave one to me. I later heard that David wasn’t too pleased about this, and maybe felt Maurice was giving away trade secrets. I kept it in storage for years. I was curious about it but didn’t use it; I was busy with other projects. When I went to Taiwan to paint aboriginal Taiwanese people I thought to use the instrument so they could see the painting happening. I practiced before I left, and really learned to use it there.

What does it add to the current project?

It’s about speed. Because you plot the points, you can go very quickly and you also cover the whole page. But you still have to redraw it and paint it, so it’s not going to give you any art. It does help shorten the phase of looking at the blank page and thinking about what to do. Still, I spend about 5 minutes with the blank page figuring out the best angle and how I want to compose it. But then immediately it’s on, and you have to move. It gets you moving very quickly and that’s really useful.

How do you organize and choose the subjects?

I’m only booked a week ahead. Every Sunday I panic that I haven’t gotten it all lined out. I really can’t fall behind and, so far, I haven’t. I worry about a cancellation on a day without a back-up person. There’s always someone who wants to be painted but I have to manage the schedule and set it up. The more I go into the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” the less it becomes about the product. It’s about the ritual, about somebody sitting down and me making them comfortable, my contacting them and their response, posting it on Facebook and their friends all seeing it and commenting. The portrait is a very small part of it, but now having done so many I have more control and they’re getting better. Now I know I can do it, and I think more about what I can bring to the table, what I can learn about them and how I can say it in the portrait.

You’re known for your portraits of men. You’ve painted Chuck Close a number of times, also David Hockney, Glenn Ligon, Alex Katz, James Siena and Leonardo Drew, just to name a few. Now with the Yale portrait, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project, you’ve also painted lots of women. What are the differences?

Before, I felt there was something about male beauty — or, let’s say male vanity — that’s more painterly. Also, I really like, and am interested in, men. But now after painting these Yale women, and having talked to so many women through the project, most of them over 40, I’ve become interested in women as they age. I don’t think we’ve looked at them enough. The next body of work will be portraits of 24 women. From the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” I’m less afraid of dealing with the emotions of female vanity. When I post the paintings of really pretty women there are always comments that “she’s prettier in real life.” So if you’re painting someone really beautiful the portrait is never going to be good enough. We really judge women. I never wanted to take that on before.

And the men on your radar?

Fred Wilson — I’ve gotten really good at painting hair. I love his hair, I love his face. I think he’s a terrific artist. He’s got all the elements that I want. And I want to paint Dawoud Bey, because he’s a portraitist. He’s fabulous looking and I love to paint the portraitist. He said he would do it, but I have to get him when he’s in town. He’s amazing, and he’s a really big guy. But I also want to paint Oona in her latest phase. And I’m due for a self-portrait.

The post A Portrait A Day — And Back In The Day: A Studio Visit with Brenda Zlamany appeared first on artcritical.

April 7 to May 4, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (646) 559-5906

The tiny, birdlike French photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici is always drawn to marginal human subjects—amazingly obese women, a mother-son nude couple, a dancer on crutches. Now, in a one-woman show of black-and-white photographs at Hionas Gallery she has turned to Priscille, a beautiful blonde French model who threw herself under a subway in an attempt to commit suicide and emerged without her limbs. Priscille’s father has disowned her for destroying the body “he gave her,” but she soldiers on.  She is even pregnant now and is amazed to think she will give birth to a creature with all its limbs.

Lopez-Huici is the opposite of, say, a Diane Arbus. She is not picturing freaks in their eccentric habitats and exaggerating their peculiarities but rather placing her odd subjects outside time and place in a noble, seamless black setting, often lit beautifully.  She has found the Venus of Willendorf in her obese women, turned them into fertility goddesses, and she has discovered what is demure or seductive in Priscille.  Many male viewers are disturbed to discover they are turned on by her mutilated body.  If she is mutilated, she is no more so than the fragments of ancient classical sculpture we know so well and admire.

From an ethical point of view it is important to remark that Priscille sought out Lopez-Huici and was disappointed that she did not photograph her right away.  Because of Lopez-Huici’s previous work, which has been widely shown (including in a big museum show in Spain), Priscille contacted her.  We are so used to privileged, intact photographers stealing the souls of the unfortunate, it’s crucial to underline that Lopez-Huici offers her people sympathy and respect.  She makes the mutilated whole.

Her affection recalls that of George Dureau, the New Orleans photographer, who pictured his limbless and homeless subjects, sometimes propelling themselves about on a skateboard, in heroic, tenderly lit poses.  Dureau’s extremely original work of the 1970s inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, who himself often found the humanity in his sado-masochistic subjects.

But Lopez-Huici photographs mostly women, bathes them in a charisma of light, banishes any lingering sense of shame and discovers, for instance, what a different culture or epoch might have admired in female obesity.  Priscille posed for Lopez-Huici over several years and we can see her gradually relaxing and becoming more secure and, finally, confronting the camera directly if timidly when her pregnancy has become evident.

It is a curiosity of photography as an art that it deals with both subjectivity and objectivity.  The model is called “the subject,” though he or she is what is looked at through the objectif, the French word for “lens.” In the early days of political correctness, critics used to complain that photographers were “objectifying” their subjects; I remember Mapplethorpe especially was attacked for objectifying black men.  But the very nature of photographing is objectifying; I can’t think how a photographer could avoid it, unless the model took a simultaneous picture of the artist, or unless the model appended, say, a long written response  to the picture.

If sympathy and obvious respect and affection count for something, however, Lopez-Huici can be said to eschew exploitation, lavishing Priscille in abundant aesthetic kindness.

The post Lavished in Kindness: Ariane Lopez-Huici Photographs Priscille appeared first on artcritical.

This film review from June 1, 2009 is artcritical’s TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES in April 2013 to coincide with the exhibition, Ariane Lopez-Huici: PRISCILLE, at Hionas Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side of New York, through May 5.

Marilia Destot’s engrossing documentary film on the life and work of Paris- and New York-based, French-born photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici is shot entirely in black and white and structured as a succession of chapters. The Body Close Up offers an in-depth retrospective of Ms. Lopez-Huici’s notable projects from the 1970s to 2008. Ms. Destot, herself a French-born photographer and media artist based in New York, draws a highly personal portrait that succeeds in unveiling sensual and metaphysical currents at the root of the artist’s oeuvre.

The film’s superb editing combines still imagery with Lopez-Huici’s voice-overs, while a specially-composed soundtrack reflects her devotion to music and dance. Initially, the camera pans over a contemporary portrait of the artist seated on a carved African chair. In a confident voice, she attributes her long-standing fascination with art and eros to her upbringing in the Mediterranean, “the cradle of nudity”. She further asserts that she’s proud to be a woman, heir to Mediterranean culture’s focus on the body as the locus of human experience and understanding.

This frank and engaging monologue continues in subsequent chapters. Works described include the early series “Solo Absolu,” “Aviva,” a steamy sequence called “The Lovers,” and numerous other projects carried out in Paris, New York, and Africa. We learn how each project evolved and how viewers responded–elated in some cases, disturbed in others. Imagery is interspersed with critical responses to the work by such luminaries as Arthur Danto, Edmund White, Guy Tosatto, and Carter Ratcliff. Their comments add to the film’s intellectual breadth.

Critics, and Lopez-Huici herself, have associated her imagery with the paintings of Cézanne, Rubens, Ingres; I would add that the artist’s themes of nonconformity and psychology bring Courbet’s nudes to mind, even the late work of John Coplans. But whereas Coplans’s photographs of his own aging body were influenced by a similar fascination with European painting and African sculpture, Lopez-Huici works with non-professional models–people who share her deep regard for the body as a vehicle of the soul’s sensual, transcendent capacity. Cultivating a friendship and a working relationship with her models during the shoot and editing process, sometimes over a period of years, the photographs become a spontaneous record of their artist-performer collaboration.

Thus the film’s live footage of Lopez-Huici and her models at a studio session is important because it brings her working process to life. Having studied film and cinematography early in her career, the photographic series comes naturally. Insight into the relationship between abstraction, the body, and photography drives her to photograph not only what is seen, but also to reveal what is hidden from view. Lopez-Huici belongs to a generation of artists who often placed the body at the center of experimental art forms combining dance, performance art, sculpture, video, and photography. If sexuality and non-conformity are abiding topics in Lopez-Huici’s oeuvre, Destot’s remarkable film asserts that the body’s jubilation, exuberance, and self-acceptance are themes that lie at its heart. It is truly a collaborative documentary.

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December 6, 2007 to February 2, 2008

The majority of the black and white photographs in Ariane Lopez-Huici’s exhibition at the New York Studio School are of a group of four unclothed, uncommonly large women.  Perhaps more accurately, they are uncommonly large women in relation to most photographs of unclothed women. They are not uncommon among women in the world.

As Lopez-Huici photographs them, they are in the picture of health, proud, and comfortable. Their substantial forms seem to open and feed on the light of the photography studio, as they emerge from the surrounding darkness in the images.

It took several years to establishing a rapport between the photographer and her models, and there is even humor in some of the pictures: one, titled “Triumph” has the four women joining hands with their arms raised in apotheosis as their bulky upper arms, breasts, stomachs and thighs fold over each other and collect in the frame like luminous sculpture.

As a group, the pictures also summon up more ancient associations. They offer a counterclaim to other allusions to the Venus of Willendorf (Austria, 30,000 B.C.E.) in contemporary art. This tiny statue, with its mute pendant head and protruding belly, breasts and thighs, is thought to be a fertility deity. The sculpture plays a significant role in the quite brilliant opening chapter of Camille Paglia’s (probably deservedly maligned) book, “Sexual Personae”.

Paglia describes this figurine as containing women’s essential power: that of the dark, primitive mysterious forces of procreation and destruction, of instinct and blood, rooted in the earth. Paglia says, “She isthe too-muchness of nature… She is remote as she kills and creates. She is the cloud of archaic night.”

Stubby, oversized confederates of the Venus of Willendorf are a staple of Jeff Koons production; she is embodied in the early Vacuum Cleaners, in the Rabbit, and the Puppy, among other works. By utilizing this sign, Koons argues that commercial culture furnishes society with primordial energy in order that it may be psychically healed.

Helmut Newton, particularly in his “Large Nudes” and more recently Vanessa Beecroft, both attempt to wed the Venus of Willendorf’s mysterious silence and forbidding sexual aura to another aspect of commercial culture, the hauteur of the fashion model. In all of these cases, their fallacy is in the artists’ re-investment in the myth.

Lopez-Huici, then, acknowledges the mythic power of the Venus of Willendorf, that of the earth mother and other myths of femininity as she de-mystifies them through her subjects’ specificity and ambient humanity. She prefers the primacy of the natural world to the world of signs. When seen in relation to the photographs of Lopez-Huici, the work of the other artists mentioned here seem rather coy.

A version of this review was first published by Gay City News, New York, January 17, 2008

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