Miss Van’s dolls don’t require external mechanisms to move, don’t demand the male gaze to be defined, eroticism is born and dies in themselves. Masquerade lovers, they dabble with endless fugitives identities: nymphs or witches, showgirls or shepherdesses, sadistic countesses or lubricous girls…
They started on the street, provoking passer-by with their slanted eyes, but soon percolated into galleries and museums. The CAC Malaga didn’t want to be outdone, inviting them to occupy its rooms. In El viento en mi pelo, Miss Van muses remain elusive and fanciful as usual, but we appreciate more pictorial qualities, a vaporous sensuality reminiscent of Rococo painters such as Fragonard and Boucher.
Although they don’t embody passively wet dreams of them but, as rebels damsels escaped from some corseted masked ball they take off the pompous costumes and invent their own games of seduction, experts in dialectical practice between hiding and exhibitionism.
Early poupées with which these French artist became known, those naive faces with pine nut kindred to Betty Boop, feline eyes and flapper hairstyle, acquired a Lowbrow tone. By joining perfidy and innocence using of pop models to challenge female definitions, delved into what was essentially indefinable.
In fact, playing with clichés, forcing them, made them explode. Wolves, witches, Messalinas … are revealed as mere fleeting avatars who appropriate the stigma of femme fatale to extract from it its strength. Similarly, explores its counterpart, nymphet hidden in the stereotypes of the virginal and ethereal: sylphs, dancers with tulle skirts …
In each series, Miss Van has flirted with baroque aesthetics and pictorial movements fin de siècle (symbolism, art nouveau, Degas …) where their poupées pass through freely, without stopping, flitting to and fro, making the desire pure fantasy and the fantasy pure desire.
Current exhibitions:
– Solo Show,El viento en mi pelo, in CAC, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, until 18th September
– Group show, The Expulsion of the Limbo, Fousion Gallery, Barcelona, until 20th July