Ser, sin serlo - Patricia Belli

Exhibition from 09.20 to 12.14.2019
Curated by Camille Chenais

Flyer of the exhibition Ser, sin serlo

Villa Vassilieff is happy to wel­come the first exhi­bi­tion in France of the artist Patricia Belli (1964, Nicaragua), whose artistic prac­tice unfolds through instal­la­tions including sculp­tures, draw­ings, and videos. For this exhi­bi­tion, the artist chose to gather former works of her own with more recent pro­duc­tions in which sym­bols – from dreams and mytholo­gies – evoke an unstable bal­ance between dom­i­na­tion and resis­tance, vio­lence, fear and com­pas­sion. In the space, frag­mented bodies spread out, without apparent sexual char­acter, that one might think inan­i­mate if a lin­gering ten­sion or light move­ment did not come to betray this feeling. With those anthro­po­mor­phic forms, the artist aims to ques­tion var­ious con­di­tions that can alienate or weaken a body. From hur­ri­canes to rev­o­lu­tions, insta­bility and dom­i­na­tion game are evoked through sculp­tures and their del­i­cate phys­ical bal­ance.

Download the press release

Ser, sin serlo - by Camille Chenais

In the space of Villa Vassilieff, you can find a swing, rep­re­sen­ta­tions of storms, a leg, heads, double heads, dust, a large piece of white fabric, grains of sand, a forearm, images of bodies floating in the sky, oloids, a falling stone, a rocking stool, broken pieces of glass, Xipe Totec, ... You can hear thumping noises or a lul­laby hummed during a storm. You can follow the swing of a rocking stool, the oscil­la­tion of a swing, the undu­la­tion of a twirling oloid. Their cyclical move­ments rock us. By entering the space, we do not enter an exhi­bi­tion where the works are restrained by their pedestals or dis­play sys­tems, we enter an envi­ron­ment where the artist’s work is sit­u­ated in the sculpted forms, the dif­fused noises, the move­ments cre­ated, as well as in the empty holes of the exhi­bi­tion where the links between the pieces are woven, where the expe­ri­ence of the vis­i­tors is formed. One of the first striking things is the pre­car­ious bal­ance, almost unreal, exuded by the works and their place­ment in space. Almost all of them are bal­ancing. When they are approached, a ten­sion is cre­ated, an impres­sion of danger, of insta­bility. The notion of bal­ance - and its corol­lary, imbal­ance - is recur­rent in Patricia Belli’s work, reflecting the insta­bility of our lives, the lack of con­trol we have over our envi­ron­ment and the polit­ical, domestic, inti­mate or nat­ural events that affect us.

Ser, sin serlo com­bines ceramic sculp­tures, wooden instal­la­tions, metal, glass and tex­tile pieces, with paint­ings, pho­tographs, videos and sound pieces. Patricia Belli’s work is in con­stant evo­lu­tion, she moves from one tech­nique to another, from one rep­re­sen­ta­tion to another, with dis­con­certing ease and inven­tive­ness. Through hybrid assem­blages, she cre­ates a plastic, poetic, enig­matic, some­times dis­turbing lan­guage that reflects inti­mate and social con­cerns. Her work is based on her visual and tac­tile sen­si­bility; in her work pro­cess, the explo­ration of mate­rials, their sur­faces, their form, their vul­ner­a­bility, seems to be her com­pass. "Above all, I’m a sculptor. My work with space is what moti­vates me. And later in the pro­cess there are other ideas and solu­tions that arise from my work with the mate­rial. I start with how those mate­rials behave, and this gen­er­ates a metaphor for me that in turn feeds off of my other vital con­cerns. Normally, that’s the path. I see some­thing in the street, I see some­thing in my own work­shop and I say, ’That’s flex­i­bility!’ or ’That’s vul­ner­a­bility! I see it!’ Then, what I do is to clarify that idea in some­thing that’s yet more abridged. [1]" Patricia Belli’s work always seems to emanate from a scrupu­lous obser­va­tion of her envi­ron­ment, from the sky to the cells vis­ible under a micro­scope, from the scraps for­gotten in the streets, or even from her dreams and mental images.

However, Patricia Belli’s lan­guage is not that of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, but of metaphor. She does not directly trans­late her sen­si­tive per­sonal expe­ri­ences, but ques­tions, from them, common themes such as life, death, rebirth, sys­tems of dom­i­na­tion, bal­ance and imbal­ance, the fragility of bodies, rela­tion­ships of power, of desire. All her work is thus based on this entan­gle­ment of her emo­tions, her inti­mate pro­cesses with sub­jects that tran­scend them. She does it without grandil­o­quence, with sim­plicity, some­times with humor. In Sísifa (Sisyphus [2]), a hand tries to carry stones while walking and bal­ancing on two fin­gers, on a thin white rope. Several times, the hand gives in under the weight, loses its bal­ance, and causes the stones to fall with dull noises. With sub­tlety, these images evoke the mental burden of moth­er­hood that weighs on women’s bodies. By playing with analogy or sim­i­lar­i­ties, Patricia Belli’s works act as a bridge between the artist’s per­sonal sen­si­tivity and the vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence. Inspired by Carl Gustav Jung’s the­o­ries on the col­lec­tive uncon­scious, the artist tries to trans­late her per­sonal expe­ri­ences into forms that would allow us to ques­tion human con­di­tion and the con­trol we have over it.

The first pieces Patricia showed me when we started working on this exhi­bi­tion last March were ceramic sculp­tures, still we, rep­re­senting a forearm and a leg. Their apparent anatom­ical realism sparked in me a first impres­sion of repul­sion. They reminded me of pieces of bodies that had been ripped off. There was also a hand that broke while drying. Immediately, the images of hands being ripped off by grenades of the French National Police during demon­stra­tions came to my mind. I asked her if these works evoked to her the dead bodies of the Nicaraguan demon­stra­tors [3]. She replied that they did not. It was sub­tler than that. If the vio­lence and repres­sion of Daniel Ortega’s gov­ern­ment were very much in her mind when she was working on these pieces, they were not illus­tra­tions, quite the con­trary. What inter­ests the artist is not to make a doc­u­men­tary or jour­nal­istic chron­icle of these events, but to evoke, from this expe­ri­ence, the forms of dom­i­na­tion that our bodies endure, their impacts, but also the way in which they resist and sub­vert these con­straints and oppres­sions. In the exhi­bi­tion space, these frag­mented and dis­persed bodies do not appear lying on the ground, but are placed in uncer­tain bal­ance evoking move­ment. These dis­lo­cated anatomies dis­solve the bound­aries between the living and the inert. They resist. They heal from their wounds. "It is impres­sive and tender to me the way in which the human beings try, and some­times suc­ceed, at repairing wounds, their own wounds. that of the body and the soul, and that of their objects. [4]" In Patricia Belli’s work, the body is there­fore both a vul­ner­able, fragile and inti­mate space and a space of resis­tance, of power. This sym­bolic mul­ti­plicity is often reflected in the image of the body divided, dis­persed, broken, frag­mented. This dis­lo­ca­tion high­lights the impos­sible rep­re­sen­ta­tion of an iden­tity, a cor­po­rality or a sub­jec­tivity in a fixed and stable form. "It seems that Belli cre­ates to be able to bring all her parts together. [5]" writes Miguel A. López in the first mono­graph ded­i­cated to the artist.

On the walls, almost abstract paint­ings rep­re­sent the heart of storms. These works sym­bolize nature in its most vio­lent form: its destruc­tive force. By blending with the anthro­po­mor­phic rep­re­sen­ta­tions that also pop­u­late the space, they remind us that despite all our civ­i­lizing ambi­tions, we are insignif­i­cant in the face of the planet and its unpre­dictable forces. Elsewhere two heads seem to be in dia­logue, one mounted on small drift­wood legs, the other sup­ported by a com­plex system of pul­leys and ropes. The latter’s face is cov­ered by what appears to be a second skin, evoking cer­tain rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the Aztec god Xipe Totec ("Our Lord the Flayed One" in Nahuatl). In Aztec mythology, he is the god of life, death, res­ur­rec­tion, agri­cul­ture, renewal of nature, fer­tile rain­fall and gold­smithing. Like corn seeds that lose their skin before ger­mi­na­tion, Xipe Totec skins him­self to feed humanity. This figure sym­bol­izes notions that can be per­ceived else­where in the exhi­bi­tion: those of the cycles of life, sac­ri­fice, birth and rebirth.

The whole exhi­bi­tion there­fore oscil­lates between these two oppo­sites, rebirth and destruc­tion. The artist chooses nei­ther one nor the other, but invents forms that make sense at the border of these binary oppo­si­tions. The com­plexity of Patricia Belli’s works is based on this clash between hap­pi­ness and dis­il­lu­sion­ment, anguish and empathy, doubt and joy. On two occa­sions, we meet two-headed ceramic sculp­tures in the exhi­bi­tion. Raices (Roots) is on the ground, its two peaceful faces seem almost asleep. They appear to have been together for a long time, roots have devel­oped on their skulls seem­ingly con­necting them. They remind me of ruined sculp­tures of past civ­i­liza­tions which we some­times stumble upon, on which nature seems to have regained its rights. The two heads of Pesadilla (Nightmare), on the other hand, are inhab­ited by opposing feel­ings: one seems to be in a state of horror, the other shows a serene smile. They oscil­late gently, above a pen­dulum foot. This motif of the double head mate­ri­al­izes the hybridity and con­flict of our beings, our bodies. We are both oppressed and oppressor, inno­cent and guilty, threat and threat­ened, wounded and pow­erful, cruel and gentle - our­selves and others. Ser, sin serlo. We are without being.

It is there­fore in this hybrid land­scape, with its pre­car­ious bal­ance, that vis­i­tors must find their place. They are encour­aged to sit on a rocking stool or swing whose slight swings, inten­si­fied by a sound, lead them to ques­tion their own sta­bility or insta­bility. They are also invited to roll an oloidal shape par­a­sitized by a mix­ture of inter­lac­ings and to move forms on a table cov­ered with sand, thus tracing the course of their move­ment. If, at first sight, these actions may seem playful or inno­cent, the artist, through ampli­fied sounds that are trig­gered when the pieces are set in motion, gives these actions a strangeness that bothers and ques­tions.

Translation: Alice Ongaro