Artist: Clara Esborraz
Exhibition title: Shaving the back of my head
Venue: PIEDRAS, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Date: September 14 – October 14, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and PIEDRAS, Buenos Aires
“Shaving the back of my head” is a series that functions as a continuation of “Dirty and Sloopy”, a solo show by Clara that took place in the gallery in 2019. This project was displayed in two rooms. In the first one, seven drawings portrayed the artist´s studio & bedroom, occupied by a group of girls, playing different situations. In the second one, the artist and a group of actresses remained in real time in that studio & bedroom, embodying a durational performance.
After going through the intensity of this performing experience, in 2020 Clara began a new project, also situated in a space in which she sleeps and works. Here, confinement is exacerbated, as well as night and those bodies unsettlement. In this series, a group of characters cohabit with their dreams and their nightmares, entering a hallucinatory state in which reality and fiction are entangled, while making space for the unknown.
Through the use of ballpoint pens and paper as the only elements of this work, the series holds a reduced palette according to its specific brand of pens. Predominantly black, its combinations give these works a strong contrast between the light of its lines, its fluorescent colours which resemble some disco lightening, and the darkness of the room, in which the scene develops.
The bodies in which the artist portrays herself in this series of drawings, are multiple unfoldings, in sweaty bodies, and a series of extravagant haircuts and hairstyles, which reminds us of post punk. These bodies dig into the possibilities of representation
and deformation in an image. The series explores the limits between abstraction and figuration, as well as feminine and masculine, while searching for inexplicable and ambiguous representations.
