Sôle meunière

Description

Sôle meunière

The cleaning lady is a recurring figure in the artist’s work. She blends in with her ballet, her apron, the home, the sidewalk. Her movements are Taylorist, her tools ergonomic. She doesn’t spare herself in the obedient maintenance of others’ capital. She’s part of the furniture, her presence doesn’t disturb. This figure of consented submission is opposed to that of the monster, the animal. Emancipation is not a gentle thing here: it crushes, scratches, devours. Perhaps it’s just a fantasy, an impossible thing. Maybe bodies will remain bent, arranged, threatened, and enslaved… But Priscilla Beccari’s work doesn’t lead to this impasse. Rather, it suggests, even if desperately and at the cost of some cruelty, what still resists in us.

The subjects of these drawings are not the beings who inhabit them, but the decor in which they blend: kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, or bathrooms. These familiar spaces have become anxiety-inducing, cannibalistic, and systematically closed. However, some figures manage to escape the traps of domesticity: the Venuses, as well as a plethora of anthropomorphic characters, bird-men or rams, she-wolves… but their ambiguities place them in an in-between suspended on the border of dreams and nightmares, indifferently and therefore relatively frightening.

The boldness or stuttering of the lines, the rough appearance of the media, and especially their dimensions offer these images a form of incarnation, in direct contact with the exhibition space. One can approach the whole from a distance, but everything invites one to get involved: the viewer becomes a witness, the witness a voyeur… There is a kind of trap here, rather exquisite, to inscribe oneself in this series of forms, gradually discerning the strangest aspects, surprising oneself with the crudest details.