Artist: Paloma Proudfoot
Exhibition title: Curing
Venue: Sans titre (2016), Paris, France
Date: September 27 – November 9, 2019
Photography: Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Sans titre (2016), Paris
Paloma Proudfoot navigates freely within the field of beauty, emancipated from marketing pressures to better assert her own ideals. So she gets her hands dirty, prepared to reinvent everything. The demiurgic aspect of working with clay permits this. It is not a matter of applying an exfoliating mask, avoiding the contours of the eyes, in the clinical atmosphere of an institute, but of shaping a corpulence from mud, from slush, from silt. From shit. And the preservative properties of mire are self-evident, to the point that one finds in such ground, bodies intact despite life having left them millennia ago. A natural embalmment retaliates. This double character of finitude and conservation, of vice and virtue, long permeates the imagination of the artist who crushes the flesh of the earth. Faced with the injunction to maintain one’s body stable throughout the decades, she invites us to embrace the organic evolution, the happy decay. Demise is considered here as an experience among others. The existential cosmetic is overcome. The artist braids arteries and branches in the blackness of her earthenware, a pipeworks from which the vitality of fluids reenammains to be scoured. The firing and the glazing, by paralyzing its muscles, act like a poison. Originally, the curare is extracted from certain Amazonian lianae in order to poison arrows for hunting. While its etymology might give one to believe it derives from a Latin, curative root, it is entirely the opposite that is confirmed by the native word «ourari» meaning «death that kills in a low voice».
Text by Joel Riff
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
Paloma Proudfoot, The form of the flower is unknown to the seed II, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, Do not take me for granite, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
Paloma Proudfoot, She began to write with her needle, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, She began to write with her needle, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, She began to write with her needle, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, She began to write with her needle, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, On a scale of one to ten, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, On a scale of one to ten, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, On a scale of one to ten, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, On a scale of one to ten, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, The truth isn’t the most exciting place to reach, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, The form of the flower is unknown to the seed II, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, She began to write with her needle, 2019
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
Paloma Proudfoot, Curing, exhibition view at Sans titre (2016)
