Critical texts and reviews
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ART CRITICISM AND INTERVIEWS
Steamed pumpkin’s squids series, 2012.
TEXTS
by
Fabien Danesi
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Max Torregrossa
Benjamin Perrier
Cyril Bron
INTERVIEWS
with
Fabien Danesi
LandEscape Art Review
Malika Ali
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IN THE SLIGHTLY ACID WORLD
[...] In the absence of narration, the representations have an enigmatic dimension and become sorts of puzzles. They translate a relationship to the world that abandons the obvious to seek associations of ideas, telescoping images and the saturation of signifieds. The ambiguity stems from the multiplication of plastic and semantic stimuli, epitomised by the playful and coercive, flashy and disquieting spaces, because it is impossible to settle on a single interpretation here. Through this reversibility Isabelle Lutz seeks to play with the codes of pop culture, which has abolished dreams of the absolute in favour of a deep relativism whose dominant form is still economic pragmatism. She immerses us in the heart of a postmodernity stripped of exteriority. She exposes the ambivalence of contemporary society, where the dividing line between alienation and emancipation has become more uncertain. This holds true for the women depicted [Nana, Lilly Rose, Alya Noah and the others], who can be perceived as full-fledged subjects while offering themselves as eroticised objects to the male eye. Isabelle Lutz’s illustrations do not totally eschew seduction but nevertheless remain disconcerting in the way they make an incisive judgement without denouncing it in the name of a truth. Indeed, her works’ paradoxical irony is that between formal balance and psychic tension, Isabelle Lutz forcefully underscore that the period is acid, that charm and violence mingle as never before. She does not claim to be objective in the least. On the contrary, far from taking a heroic stance, she embraces a subjectivity [and the cultural conditioning that goes with it] grappling with the complexity of Europe’s recent social and political development without, however, abandoning a critical perspective. A pictorial approach that is well worth following for its uniqueness, especially as it is only just beginning.
Fabien Danesi, Vivoequidem, 2009.
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THE WOMAN & THE CITY
Sharp features, pronounced geometrism. The woman and the city. The woman is inside the city without being really in it. She seems to be misplaced, almost haggard, in search of a gaze. The goal seems simple: connecting Being with its scenery. It takes some time. The artist herself has taken her time before daring to engage herself in this adventure and devoting herself "physically" to it. It is about questioning the landscape as much as the feminine. To embody it — a particular body — while showing the links that allow questioning oneself about the power of the image, the poetics of the city, of the desire and of the expectation.
Such an attempt is about drawing not only "some" landscape but also a glance, a thought. It is a quest that, from a geographical urban point [sometimes we seem to recognize the postmodern aspect of Geneva’s new districts], allows one to spin the world. It is also a matter of lifting images and their colours, replacing them with others, in the manner of Cézanne when he replaced the mountain with rectangles.
The aim is not to introduce the pattern but some pattern, within a visual language that reveals a kind of solitude — a muffled solitude. Gradually, the focus of the gaze shifts out of the perspective lines of the urban buildings onto those of the women. The same geometrism sets out their variations, but according to a presence that opposes the city and the woman. From this "pictorial" experience arises the exploration and the crossing of gaps.
The artist undoubtedly dives into a work at the limits of the language, at the border of two worlds: that of Being, and that which surrounds it — an environment that gnaws, grinds down, but sometimes magnifies the woman. Her sharp yet sensual forms allow us to reach the transition point between a sensory experience and another. Isabelle Lutz remains on the razor's edge between the strongest possible literality and the necessary reflexive transfer that iconographic language installs.
Hence the perpetual quest of the transfer, of an encrustation of the woman in the city. But this confrontation opens each time a gulf between pictures and things, the inner landscape and the scenery. Diving into the [bitter ?] abyss with all her creative energy, Isabelle Lutz gives herself over to a pursuit and a penetration, both unprecedented, in layers not only sedimentary but belonging to dark areas. They are made of tearing and growths in a geometric language stretched to its limits.
Her work contains in its very structure a necessary brutality. Initially to ensure this brutality the artist painted directly with her fingers on large formats. But little by little — and no doubt recalling her architectural training — the artist naturally refined her technique. The delicacy of the lines never diminishes the initial brutality. On the contrary, it strengthens it, makes it more violent, incisive. Her women — thin, almost anorexic, famished-eyed — look like the wanderers of a city that no longer has anything human about it — or scarcely so. Such women with their eyes look more like icons than psychological portraits. They are somehow the Saints of an atheist universe, soulless. They possess an almost "religious" power of transfiguration.
It is evident that the painting in its figuration is more complex than it seems. Isabelle Lutz let survive a paradise, or better said its ersatz and the unsaid of existence. Women remain suspended from the world, or rather the way they lean upon it is significant. They are a departure for a cosmic expansion at the time when, however, the urban landscape intends to block everything. Sometimes the bodies seem ready to switch to transparency, so far, so near from our universe. However they resist. They seem on their way to paths where walking is not enough, but where they could live a new Odyssey in which the woman would no longer be a Penelope of the XXI century.
As surface or limit an [organised] jumble of lines [underwear viewed in transparency] remains. Chirico is not far and Duchamp's Bride either. In its simplicity of lines each canvas reveals potential: the image gives pause to reflection beyond the principle of surface: the density, the gap, the transition. In their urge the lines exceed their own role. Life giving birth — as a canvas can suggest: in front of a woman’s spread legs, a child seems to rise out of her deep feminine source while guided by hand. This is enough to say the inexpressible and to extract it from the chaos.
Everything in the work remains underlying to better step forward. Lines and curves achieve what words do not even manage. The stiff plasticity collects abruptly the sensations. We dwell in reserve, not in sentimentality. It is obvious that the artist could be the perfect daughter born of the city of Calvin. The lines create, search without soliciting, without intoxicating themselves but to reach the very state of Being in the heart of uncertainties and failures.
Not only instinct, but all the wisdom of a lifetime is required to create such works. We are — beyond the fantasies — in the heart of a traumatic relationship between Being and city. Like the artist’s women — who are everything but superficial — we are immersed in it. Isabelle Lutz’s women haggard and bony testify that within "the filthy city" [Baudelaire] life cannot deny itself. Certainly "there is nothing living which proceeds from nothingness or yearns for it" [St-John Perse] but not everything can fall for nothingness. There is thus in the pictorial language of the artist "an incessant flux of Being" [Ibid.] that answers the immeasurable complaint of the Origin.
Almost impalpable silhouettes lay bare what the male consciousness refuses to hear, to such an extent that there exists in the male a denial of knowledge and an immobilism. Here, the work opens onto an exciting problem. Indeed at a given point, painting paralyzes the movement of the city but at the same time sets in motion a force that goes forward. This is why the artist finds it so difficult to permanently freeze each of her silhouettes.
Each one is based on the totality of those that precede it. The idea required by the artist is that of a segmented continuity. She does not deny each canvas its value as a small unit, a small unique image, but she inscribes it within a whole in the process of being formed. It is perhaps about discovering the fundamental permanence of a consciousness recovered through the mystery of the world, until it returns to itself, to openness, to the origin, to find the justification for existence.
Unlike Baudelaire, already mentioned above, Isabelle Lutz does not believe that "The lyrical soul takes strides as vast as syntheses". Her creation partakes more of the alchemy of slowness. Therefore facing all these philosophers of the time, who twist the needle of the compass by denying the human being in the name of skepticism, who only brandish the constant defeats of the soul, the artist gives back body to the soul, soul to the body, refusing renunciation in a search for fulgurations.
Hence the dialogue under the aegis of the woman and the city, of softness and indifference. Facing the dehumanised city only the woman allows betting on the meaning of things. She even becomes the explanation and echoes Borne’s statement: "How to explain the purpose of the meaning without following the woman path." Out of the paintings she tracks us with her eyes: we should not lose sight of her, to extricate ourselves from the concrete quagmire and to always keep in us a desire for the infinite. We could call this making the best use of love.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, Arts-up's chronicles, 2011.
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AUT VULVA AUT VULTUS
[...] Visually, Isabelle Lutz’ paintings are striking. The visual impact is undeniable. They are acrylic works on large canvas. None is smaller than 160 cm in its largest dimension. Colorful representations depict one or more characters, almost exclusively women, partially disrobed [Barring two or three exceptions]. Characteristic features are their fixed stare, eyes wide open with closed lips. All of them are placed in complex architectural environments or decors where the use of form and color is different from that of the characters, which are indeed painted in an almost naïve way but with an obvious formal intent. The brush strokes are visible, as well as the pencil lines. The colors are not applied in flat areas, unlike the elements of the "décor" which are perfectly delineated by both, the contours and the monochrome tints. The red colour is ubiquitous and even frequently imposing. Blue is also repeatedly obvious as well as white that works as a colorimetric reference. Overall, the palette is rather "cold".
The depictions are not narrative. The characters are, admittedly, caught up in a situation, their gestures and attitudes are sometimes identifiable, but it is impossible to explicitly describe a specific scene. The image seems to operate more like a picture puzzle with a strong semiotic resonance. Their titles are involved in the process, since they are usually nominal sentences playing on words, syntax or sounds. Isabelle Lutz also confirms that they are of equal importance to the depiction.
When I first faced her works, I was struck by an obvious presence which was not visible in the photographs. Confusingly, I had the feeling that it was not just about simple "re-presentations". I knew this feeling for also having experienced it in front of some paintings of the Quattrocento. I am specifically referring to two of them, one of Paolo Uccello, which is at the National Gallery in London: St. George and the dragon, and the other of Giovanni Bellini, a small panel forming the right basis of the pilaster of Pesaro altarpiece [Pesaro, Italy]: Saint Terence. In both cases, I was disconcerted by the relationship between the characters and their surrounding. On Uccello’s painting, the cave appears to be made of cardboard, the dragon is a science fiction creature, the rider seems to spring from nowhere, and the princess, frozen, is quietly keeping on a leash the monstrous beast with beautifully spotted wings. However, despite this flagrant disparity of the elements, everything seems to hold together and to have rhyme and reason. Concerning Pesaro’s panel, the undulating and very carnal presence of a person on a stone pedestal in the middle of an empty architecture, rigid, silent and anxiety-inducing is intriguing. A model of fortification is displayed on the tray that the saint holds in the manner of a waiter, while his orgasmic glance seems to submit itself to the upper left corner of the painting [in fact towards the main altar representation: the coronation of the Virgin].
I have the exact feeling that each of these two works is directed at a gaze that must be in the know... I am forced to imagine the existence of a dialogue to which I am not invited and this felt absence, this “non-destination“ that has delegated its representation to what I see [the manifest content] generates in me an alternation of frustration and desire. In other words: interest. At the time of the Quattrocento, the absence [generating desire] also existed. It could be “the unachievable“ in this world: redemption, holiness or closeness with exceptional embodiments [Christ, Holy Family, saints, etc.]. And the stronger this absence was felt, the more could be expected in a powerful demonstration of its mimesis, in art in particular. What was different is that everyone accepted these sensitive representations of a collective desire because everybody felt almost exactly the same deprivation.
Today, the artist is not anymore the one who was contractually asked to make this common absence visible. Now his only desire is expressed in his productions. The viewer has no possibility to determine the rationale of the work since it does not aim at him in the first instance; he is no longer concerned. So either he accepts the manifest content because he grants the artist and his lack an autonomous value or he takes over the whole work for representing his own desires. The artist then is of no more importance.
Concerning Isabelle Lutz, I felt that I was dealing with both, a personal desire and also a a common property. Nothing extraordinary, you could say, since it is easy to imagine that every artist feels like legitimately carrying a collective complaint. However, for Isabelle, it occurred to me that her work was not a singular act seeking a collective dimension, but the opposite. As if the apparent community's claim, thus displayed, intended to become an essentially individual requirement.
Who is looking?
Without fear of truism, let us say that Isabelle Lutz shows us something to see. Technically, the construction of her works with firmly delineated and colored spaces leads us to what can be called "enclosure effects". The eye, thus fixed by the elements, is prompted to produce meaning, and the whole process of appropriation of image, scrutinising, selection and semiotisation is greatly facilitated by the choices and modes of representations. This is obviously intentional, as the artist gives full play to the gaze function, one can say on one side or on the other because all the characters have their faces turned toward the viewer, eyes wide open. So then these women stare at us and one of them takes photographs of us [Hobnobbing with Doozy (Zaza's Foolish Love), April 2009].
However Isabelle Lutz’s "visual appetite" clashes with her website home page. The visitor is greeted by a simple photograph supposedly of the artist, where she holds with both hands, in a theatrical gesture, a dark cloth that covers her entire face. It is interesting to notice this because the female characters in her paintings resemble her physically. During the interview with Fabien Danesi, Isabelle admits that she "melts into [her] characters" and that "the physical resemblance affiliated [her] with an affective community that gives to the pictorial composition a special, sui generis particularity". So, while some watch eagerly and shamelessly show, another blinds herself, hides — and lets it be known. This photograph where she conceals her face reminds one of Magritte's aprosopic characters [The Lovers, 1928]. They also have their head covered with a cloth, with the same effect, but I do not think there is a similarity of cause. I rather think that the attitude is simply significant: claim a necessary presence while not being reachable by sight. I take from this that Isabelle Lutz is aware of the scopophilic pleasure that her works provoke. She may know that the glance is a genuine attempt at domination, that the eye aims to incorporate the seen thing, for appropriating it. The "big eyes" of Little Red Riding Hood [better to see you with] precede the “big teeth“ [better to eat you with], Actaeon for having seen Artemis in her bath has been devoured by his own dogs and if Lot had turned his head to see Sodom, his glance would have drawn on him the divine punishment that struck the city. And we should not forget the character that photographs us in Hobnobbing with Doozy [Zaza's Foolish Love]. This fully dressed woman positioned herself at the right side of the image, away from her entirely naked and bald twin who "makes the show". While this woman looks at us with open eyes and closed mouth, the other points her camera towards us, whose lens contains an open mouth full of teeth!
Offering the viewer "delicacies", namely the women’s nakedness, the ambiguous sexuality, shimmer of colors, interrogation through the enigma [picture puzzle], the possibility of transgression [go beyond despite the do-not-enter found in certain works], Isabelle Lutz wants to trap the viewer. She seeks to attract him, to convert him into a voyeur and to capture his glance in the disturbing construction of the decor and complicated scenes.
Surrounding
This essential element, the surrounding, the scenery has, during the 3 last years, undergone a considerable mutation. Except for three paintings whose representation is clearly "outdoors", and the first two of which the background is white, all other representations are enclosed, sociofugal settings becoming more complex as her production rises. The space becomes increasingly fantastic; it stiffens while impossible perspectives, close parallels, alternative spaces where straight lines intersect hatching strange geometric constructions, planes that enclose the stage behind a kind of front projection, are built. One gets the impression that everything happens in a sort of corridor, cone or tube that tapers towards the bottom of the image. The eye is therefore found fixed at the "farthest" point, lost in a real labyrinth.
I must say that these perspectives or rather these architectural constructions have deeply intrigued me because they are accurate, robust and effective. However, I remember that Isabelle told me that she did not plan her paintings very far in advance. There are no preparatory drawings or prototype testing. She achieves her representations almost directly on the canvas and I had the thought that the artist did not paint so much with a three-dimensional geometric perspective, that is to say with the intention to show us a volume, as [with] a two-dimensional flat space. What we see then as a depth of field could well be none and the deepest point might just be the center of the construction, as if it were a spider web!
Let’s now observe the characters. These are women who look more or less alike: same figure, same morphology, same face. Some animals and sometimes children or men are found, in subordinate positions. But in fact, women — or rather, the Woman — are indeed those who are omnipotent, dominating and perfectly adapted to the environment that obviously seems to be theirs. Let’s be even more precise. Let’s consider three paintings: Heavy Botton Space [January 2008] Female Commotion [March 2008] and Makeda & the Tricksters [Coco & Rosie's bisounours] of June 2009.
For Heavy Bottom Space, the oldest of the three, Isabelle told me that it was conceived in the wake of a dream in which men wearing waders were in a kind of pond under high voltage power lines. The dreamlike representation turned into four women in underwear or swimsuits, in an interior whose walls are made of vertical strips and a rectangle in perspective on the floor, light blue, bordered with fine colored lines. Three women are sitting on giant cubes. They all have their hands behind their back, long legs slightly disproportionate, the same hair cut and their wide open eyes facing the viewer. Their bodies, or rather their flesh is painted in a special way. Mixtures of red, white and green colors create reflections. The left one has a swollen and deformed abdomen but ultimately, I was not shocked because I was sure to face spider-women. Together, they wait perfectly still, staring with their gaze on the one who might be their next prey. If I were exaggerating, I would say that the nipples, symmetrically arranged relative to the eyes represent as many organs of vision as the ones located on the cephalothoraxes of arachnids...
Let’s move on to Female Commotion. Now the painting is no longer available. It remains in a private collection, but we have photographs. Four women stand in a very dark and narrow corridor that tapers towards the bottom on the right. The walls are mostly black. The ceiling is brown, the ground is light colored and shows fine white lines that build an interior architecture in the style of a cage. The figures are painted in black and white and move towards the viewer, diagonally from the upper right corner to the lower left one. Their strange ambulation undeniably brings to mind a spidery progression.
Makeda & the Tricksters [Coco & Rosie's bisounours] is a recent painting whose particular feature is to present dressed female characters and even warmly for one of them. Three women in the foreground and four other characters are back in a more developed surrounding than in other representations. A wide staircase occupies the left part and a balustrade topped with red poles on the right one. Behind the balustrade, a woman holds a leash, whose end is not seen and it is unclear whether it concerns an animal or a human being like in Karl’s Fetischism. The background, wallpaper like, consists of a kind of grid. The woman in the foreground wears a long blue tunic whose too long sleeves cover her hands. Her face is very pale, her hair is close-cropped or tied on her neck; her eyes are ringed with black and wide open. She seems calm, frozen, her arms slightly apart. Several black edges cut her tunic on the outlines, neck and chest. The ends of her sleeves are also black and one pointed out that it looks like the legs of a horse with hooves since the hands are not seen. In fact, these two arms, due to the shape of the tunic, seem to reach the sides rather than the shoulders and actually are reminiscent of legs. Black rays, which form the origin of the general perspective, emerge from her right temple, and it reminds me of the animal spinning its web by extracting silk from its abdomen, silently, meticulously; tightening the threads with its legs. Behind her, other people are waiting, one sitting on the steps, and one sitting on her heels. A woman in the foreground left starts a vague head and chest motion to better observe something that seems to be expected...
Who is waiting?
In Isabelle Lutz’s representations, there is no action in the sense that the viewer's eye does not catch a particular scene that would be happening. On the contrary, all the characters are frozen. They pose and, ultimately, wait to be looked at. Their gestures and attitude in this regard are clear and if women slip their hand in their knickers [Sugar Pops Honey Tale, 2008], they do it without being surprised by the viewer. One just needs to look at the expression on their faces to know that they do it on purpose for the viewer. They are thus, women [and by extension Isabelle Lutz] who are waiting.
Voluntarily, they put themselves in the position to be seen, observed and consumed. A fairly old work [2007] is even more explicit, since it offers the viewer the virtual opportunity of coitus [Fuck Me Tender, 2007]. A naked young woman, sitting on a stool lifts her leg at the height of her face. In doing so, she deliberately shows her vulva. She also stretches out her hand, palm facing the viewer, fingers spread out in a gesture signifying stop. On the wall in the background, a tiny portrait of a man dressed as a clown observes the scene. All these characters by offering themselves to the glance of the spectator clearly wish him to trigger a specific action. As Isabelle Lutz says: "nudity helps to catch the eye. Women are positioned around exhibitionism and voyeurism poles according to an archaic code system. The idea is simple, if not elementary: causing a reaction in a Pavlovian manner". Visual stimulation [aroused by nudity] would therefore act like a conditioned reflex and it is assumed that the artist considers, particularly between her characters and the "voyeur" a confrontation of libidinal type. However, only women are exposed which can mean that Isabelle, claiming her choice of exhibitionism/voyeurism only addresses a male population or only a legal person whose gaze would be male. Arguably it is the whole society to which the artist proposes with these paintings the manifest representation of a collective desire that she considers archaic and therefore outdated. If it were the case, it would be a form of women's activism. In this way, Isabelle would propose to us a vision of the alienated woman by a glance that would sexualise her.
Personally I think that we are still very far from these "essentialist" or "constructionist" movements of the seventies. Her purpose is of a different nature in particular because displayed sexuality is actually only a lure.. Even if Isabelle Lutz’s women are disrobed, they are not erotic despite their plasticity conforming to the current standards of beauty. They are never completely naked [with the exception of two paintings] and overall, there is no vulval hyperbole. We know from the Venus of Urbino and the Olympia that the scopic privilege makes it impossible to look at both the face and the vulva: aut vulva aut vultus. The oracular power of the face is indeed so important that it excludes nature. Now Isabelle has chosen the face. Moreover, she only split women’s underwears in Hunky Dory Froggy with a vertical line for indicating the organ. Of course, there is the masked man on a leash in Karl's Fetischism, and some secondary female characters attached in equivocal positions [Sweetie & the Hotpatooties, April 2009], but it does not seem to be an overtly sexual practice.
I rather think that Isabelle Lutz pictured the intimacy of bodies as key value of modernity; the body is now a "boundary marker", a "factor of individualisation" that marks the difference between an individual and another. The face she shows us ostentatiously is also the most individualised part of the body, which is not here the great social body, but a body of its own. In her works, she shows it to us, dispersed and frozen in an interior space without perspectives or dimensions where it is regarded as an object-body, an object-individual. However, this affirmation-denunciation would not be really interesting if it were not going further. I think that Isabelle Lutz found above all, a way to escape the grasp of the eyes of others, grouped or not into "society" which like the Basilisk, poisons the ones it stares at, but by enclosing it today in a structure that separates and destroys.
Alexander the Great had a shield made, polished as a mirror to divert the eyes of the monster, if he came his way. Isabelle does the same thing. She placed her spider women everywhere with their lure to attract the eyes of others [including ourselves]. Trapped by the promise of visual delights [the "pop" side to which Fabien Danesi refers], it is our turn to be seen by the emotional community of Isabelle Lutz. In return, it reflects back to us this look that we have put on it and it is again our turn to be locked into our own alienating structure. That is why the works of Isabelle Lutz are not insignificant and do not leave us indifferent: they are fighting and I remember she had mentioned her artistic practice as an act of resistance by referring to Deleuze. In the book Two Regimes of Madness, the author speaks of the work of art [and the struggle of men] as a means to resist... but to resist to death! For this reason we shall not forget the ubiquitous red color in Isabelle’s paints. In the St Mark's atrium of Venice there are mosaics of the Creation [thirteenth century]. One illustrates "the separation of light from darkness", and we see that the "darkness" is blue and the "light" is red...
Max Torregrossa, Vivoequidem, 2009.
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THE CONTEMPLATION OF THE ABSURD
[...] Isabelle Lutz [born in Geneva in 1975] "devotes herself to the contemplation of the absurd to reach happiness within reach of her paintbrushes" in the extension of her ten fingers. Alluring in spirit and in her will to work art in all its excess.
Haranguing the arrogance of people and their simplicities, paving one’s way among the frights of the soul and the unrests of the mind, transcribing on canvas the present orientation of the world toward a generalised nonsense, the artist depicts multiple universes with this constant unique flame that bubbles in her: her imagination. "I confide my ingenuousness to Mother Imagination" she likes to explain. But be warned, all is not deconstructive criticism, repeated and disorganised assaults on a fragmented and liquefied society. The artist "continues to believe in the evolution of this society in spite of its obvious tetraplegia". And her work mingles the strange, the beautiful, the simple, the cold and the warm, comforting colours. The universe she presents is punctuated with the rhythm of life's and cities' sounds and her tendencies, tugging at the polished pictures of this world to set them back against their strict reality.
Entirely immersed in her artistic passion at the age of thirty [in October 2005, after a MSc in Psychology], the work of Isabelle Lutz is already very rich. As if the beautiful lady hid a beast during many years that only waited for the right moment to liberate itself. Some of her works of art will never be forgotten. Those exhibited from 1st November 2007 to 29th February 2008 in the Cercle des Dirigeants d'Entreprises de Genève [Geneva Business Leaders Circle] did not leave anyone unmoved. Beings of flesh, bare, battered by their inner suffering, exposed on canvases, challenge the observer and even the observation itself.
At first sight, it is a true visual shock. Further, the exhibited work, which may disturb some, brings one to ask oneself the question of the observer observed. Who observes whom? The drawn human shape seems to shout its finiteness in painting facing the spectator, curious or disgusted to see this shape, or to see him or herself, in a blinding flash. It is not only a work of mental and imaginative composition peculiar to every creator anxious to deliver an artistic or personal message, but a work of re-composition of thoughts, of thinking immediacies, to clash the human blocks together and to agitate, or at least to clutch every particle of consciousness in each of them.
Make way for the expressive characters, for the blows of a club to the head, for the abrupt mirror effects; the canvases of Isabelle Lutz are of a beautiful artistic aggressiveness, pricking where it hurts, lighting where fire had died out for a long time, catching the eye in a flamboyance of features and pictorial streams, finally clutching the human consciousness for one unique, explosive moment. Fantasies are also flung onto the canvas and the effects strike home almost at once, full in the face. Certainties flown, doubt reborn, the vegetable-woman or the tinned-man becomes alive for an infinite time in the pictures, at the mercy of every gaze, wired into the raw immediacy of Isabelle Lutz's artistic expression.
Benjamin Perrier, l’Extension, 2008.
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AN INVITATION TO FREEDOM
With her fingers loaded with emotion, Isabelle Lutz scatters her colors on the canvas and characters start to exist in the pictorial matter. A painting in motion, always metamorphosed by the artist's gestures — characters start to exist in the pictorial matter. Bodies bathed in solitude emerge little by little, often depicted with unflinching starkness, without indulgence. Complex and ambiguous beings, emaciated and yet round and fleshy in shape. At once repulsive and appealing. Their carnal and erotic existence is embodied in minimalist settings, sometimes non-existent.
But beyond the realistic space, it is a thought that is at work in every canvas. Isabelle Lutz began by painting works that were rather surrealist and narrative, then turned towards a more expressive painting. A work that doesn't try to seduce, but proposes to the spectator something destabilising, like a mirror of our own mediocrity, of what makes us "human, too human". Isabelle Lutz tries to scrape the surface of the appearances, to discover what hides behind our standardised and conventional lives. Her painting stirs in us an explosion of feeling, beyond any cultural or intellectual constraints. An invitation to freedom.
Cyril Bron, Murmures magazine, 2007.
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INTERVIEW WITH FABIEN DANESI
Fabien Danesi
You started painting at the age of 30, without any formal training, as a self-taught artist. Could you begin by telling us about the circumstances that led you to take up painting?
Isabelle Lutz
I came to painting through writing. After finishing a novel [unpublished], I felt a sense of relief at having completed the project, yet I didn’t feel any satisfaction. I had the unpleasant feeling of having reached a limit too quickly, without having managed to grasp a dimension that seemed to me essential to the psychical elaboration of the narrative. I think the seed of painting must have been sown at that moment. After a few years — latency, so to speak — I woke up one morning [it was my thirtieth birthday], and decided to become a painter. It was, overnight, a total immersion. I held my breath for the first two years, without even realising it. The spirit was punk: I was interested in the process, without really worrying about the result. In fact, looking back now, this translation into action seems to me to have sprung from an impulse ex nihilo.
Fabien Danesi
Do you know why you chose painting as your medium rather than photography or video? Why painting?
Isabelle Lutz
Because my painting is literary: it is an extension of the word. I work through associations. For me, the image derives almost exclusively from the lexicon, and therefore from thought. The medium of painting was the most suitable vehicle for an act of perceptive utterance: I was seeking to represent what recedes from language. Moreover, I had space and walls to personalise.
Fabien Danesi
So that means your work was initially intended to be hung on your own walls: there was no element of public display?
Isabelle Lutz
I did indeed make the space I lived in my own. That said, the desire and intention to initiate a dialogue were present from the very beginning.
Fabien Danesi
What was your artistic background at the time? Did you go to museums? Were you familiar with contemporary art?
Isabelle Lutz
Virtually none. I discovered a little-known world.
Fabien Danesi
You actually started out without any real points of reference. Wasn’t your primary motivation simply to express yourself? Was there a sense of urgency?
Isabelle Lutz
From the very beginning, I framed my work in terms of discontinuity, due to my need to reassess my sense of belonging. I think it was a matter of drawing from separation an experience of singularity. By cutting myself off from the outside world, I was able to undergo an interrogation into the place of narcissistic withdrawal as an adaptation to an environment which, in my view, indulges far too wildly in "reductionism". I painted in the urgency of gesture, under the dictates of the body and its tensions. Today, I feel that this period of isolation has allowed me to decentre myself and — this is the paradox — to anchor myself ever more deeply within myself.
Fabien Danesi
It’s the process, ultimately...
Isabelle Lutz
The process, and the experience.
Fabien Danesi
Did you initially approach your painting practice in terms of subject matter? When you started painting, did you decide, for example, to work figuratively as opposed to abstractly? What was your mindset at the time? And today, do you think about a subject?
Isabelle Lutz
No, I just let myself go. You have to imagine that action took precedence over reflection: the pace was relentless and breathing spaces were few and far between. I had the next two, three, four canvases already imposing themselves on me while I was still grappling relentlessly with the painting I was working on. Today, thankfully, I’ve found a comfortable pace: the paintings follow one another quite naturally in a serene continuity.
Fabien Danesi
You have previously referred to the notion of volume when discussing your characters. Could you elaborate on this concept?
Isabelle Lutz
I visualise the image without defining its contours, or even its colours. The characters appear in my mind as cylinders of varying lengths. The volume and spatial orientation of the different elements form the weave from which to compose.
Fabien Danesi
In a very abstract way, at first.
Isabelle Lutz
Yes, abstract and minimalist.
Fabien Danesi
Looking at your early paintings, one gets the sense that painting is also a very physical practice. I’ve spoken of gesturality and expressiveness, but one even gets the impression that you attached particular importance to the material itself. Were these early works a way of asserting an organic relationship with the world? Wasn’t there also a need to establish your identity a little, I mean your "physical identity"?
Isabelle Lutz
Perhaps. I felt a desire to confront the canvas, in a sensory and sensual face-to-face encounter. It was a matter of translating the turmoil of opposing forces engaged in a struggle of drives. Everything played out in the moment, and continued in an eternal recommencement, where my subjectivity was my only point of reference.
Fabien Danesi
It was a necessary first step.
Isabelle Lutz
Yes, it was an introduction paving the way for a shift in gaze: from the intimate to the collective or, in other words, the transition from a [one-dimensional] approach centred on feeling to a [systemic] perspective opening up a socio-psychological space.
Fabien Danesi
Ultimately, the fact that the gesture subsequently became more restrained is evidence of greater control...
Isabelle Lutz
Of greater distance.
Fabien Danesi
Your canvases often depict female figures, usually unclothed. And when one looks at these early paintings, one might get the impression that they resemble you. Yet you have already mentioned that, for you, they are not self-portraits. What, then, is the connection you have with these figures on the canvas?
Isabelle Lutz
The connection that exists generally stems from a process of projection, which is necessarily accompanied by a fleeting identification and an internal focalisation. In other words, I merge with my characters while distancing myself from my own perception in order to experience their perspective. Thus, they are both familiar and alien to me. Nevertheless, the physical resemblance connects me to an [affective] community that gives the pictorial composition a singularity of its own kind. I have, however, attempted the formal experiment of the self-portrait on one occasion.
Fabien Danesi
And if we take up your term "affective community", what does that imply? Does it mean that through your paintings, you seek to reflect a society? The principle of a "community" ultimately allows one to break through loneliness in a way...
Isabelle Lutz
This community was indeed created out of a sense of lack. Today, its function is quite different: it displays a specific social character.
Fabien Danesi
Yes, that’s what I was going to say. It may no longer be an emotional community, since it’s a community that reflects the way you view society as well.
Isabelle Lutz
Absolutely.
Fabien Danesi
Its function has evolved, particularly due to the presence of an environment that wasn’t there in the early paintings: it was only from the end of 2006 that the figures began to appear within a space. Is that what shifted things?
Isabelle Lutz
I think so, yes.
Fabien Danesi
I mentioned earlier your characters who are unclothed. I get the impression that your relationship with nudity is quite ambivalent in your paintings, that it isn’t always attractive. I’m thinking of your early works, in which I find the flesh almost panting, a little pathetic, even painful. How do you view those early works and that relationship with nudity today?
Isabelle Lutz
Nudity serves to capture the gaze. Women are staged around the poles of exhibitionism and voyeurism according to a system of archaic codes. The idea is simple, not to say elementary: to provoke a Pavlovian reaction. It is true that at the beginning, the flesh seemed nervous, caught mid-motion, whereas today, they seem to me to have succumbed to greater passivity.
Fabien Danesi
It is true that, in this respect, there is a greater sense of serenity in the latest paintings.
Isabelle Lutz
A semblance of stasis.
Fabien Danesi
Today, you are fully aware of the erotic element present in your work.
Isabelle Lutz
No, not really. I fetishise women in their sexuality, without actually entering into an erotic dimension as such.
Fabien Danesi
If I take the example of Lost in Locomotion, I was immediately struck by the central figure, which depicts a shinbone and a knee in skeletal form. It is true that the female figure does not lend itself to eroticisation, understood as seduction. At the same time, for me, eroticism isn’t to be dismissed as quite so obviously as you suggest.
Isabelle Lutz
In this case, I would see it as the depiction of a morbid eroticism.
Fabien Danesi
How about a beer? and Have you seen my toothbrush? — which date from late 2007 — are two paintings that strike me as pivotal, as it is from this point onwards that your heroines begin to embed themselves within a space characterised by sweeping perspectives. Around the same time, I get the impression that your drawing style becomes more graphic. How did you understand and experience this evolution in your work?
Isabelle Lutz
I had to produce one or two paintings and find a more balanced composition. Heavy Bottom Space is, in this respect, a pivotal work: I mastered that impulse so as to make a decision with full awareness.
Fabien Danesi
What was that decision?
Isabelle Lutz
To achieve a more contemporary finished product, reflecting a more rigorous cognitive process and a more homogeneous visual rendering.
Fabien Danesi
Is this a move away from subjectivity?
Isabelle Lutz
No. I have distanced myself from the action, while affirming a greater awareness of the gesture. This has allowed me to view my work from a less personal angle, while incorporating a paradoxical dimension.
Fabien Danesi
What, then, is your guiding principle?
Isabelle Lutz
I have decided to situate my work within a feminist framework.
Fabien Danesi
Does that mean that situating your characters in a space that serves as a metaphor for the social sphere is a way of addressing the situation of woman in Western or European countries?
Isabelle Lutz
Yes, while owning my responsibility and my privileged position as a Western woman. As disparities are rife, I feel it is essential to continue to maintain a tension around the issue of woman’s status.
Fabien Danesi
But do you see your works as conveying a message of protest? And if so, in what way?
Isabelle Lutz
One can glimpse feminist demands through the contrast between the woman presented as an object and her mental structuring that identifies her as a subject. She exposes herself without amputating her own substance. I have, in fact, just finished Organik Circus, a painting depicting a woman...
Fabien Danesi
... with a prosthesis. Does this feminist dimension not also come through in this constant confrontation with the viewer? For, if there is one element to highlight, it is the fact that most of your characters look towards the viewer and embrace their nudity. They do not merely offer themselves as objects to the viewer; they confront the viewer’s own gaze. Is there something conscious about that?
Isabelle Lutz
Indeed. Femininity is expressed in a phallic manner, through a defiance that manifests a certain authority: there is no desire to flee.
Fabien Danesi
In a way, the woman endures her sexual image while embracing it, that is to say without fleeing the situation, which creates a possibility of emancipation. Let’s say that the dimension of the sexual object is present, but that at the same time there is an attempt to transcend it and, by that very act, a refusal to be subjugated.
Isabelle Lutz
Exactly.
Fabien Danesi
The ambivalence you mention regarding your characters is reflected in the depicted space: this space is both very colourful and geometric. It is chromatically very dense, yet features very distinct lines. These visual details reveal two contradictory dimensions, the first playful and the second coercive. Could you explain how you conceive of this space?
Isabelle Lutz
I play with contrasts so that they clash. It’s a way of using the power of contradictions to compose an image that is not paradoxical, but complex, and to artificially maintain a tension around a point of equilibrium. Sometimes, this achieves a rather effective impact.
Fabien Danesi
What sort of impact?
Isabelle Lutz
A visual impact.
Fabien Danesi
It’s an aesthetic of shock.
Isabelle Lutz
I’m trying to move in that direction, yes.
Fabien Danesi
If we return to Heavy Bottom Space [2008], we see that the women are seated on giant dice, which might suggest that the space created is a dreamlike one. I’d like to know what role dreams play in your work?
Isabelle Lutz
There is a dreamlike quality underlying it all. I make use of fantasy, dreams or any other manifestation related to the expression of desire.
Fabien Danesi
You said that your paintings struck you as a representation of the situation of woman today. Looking at your figures in this urban setting, which is rather disembodied and abstract, your paintings in a way raise the issue of contemporary alienation. Is that a term you would use?
Isabelle Lutz
Let’s say I understand alienation as a movement, where the social individual evolves in a precarious position between various normative constraints and cultural pressures. The the formatting endured produces a collective individual, divested of their singularity and often stripped of responsibility.
Fabien Danesi
But are your paintings observations of this contemporary alienation, or a response to it?
Isabelle Lutz
I don’t subscribe to a logic of collective emancipation, but rather to a desire for individual evolution that stems from a dialectic between self-cultivation and investment in the socio-political sphere. An approach that could be likened to "altruistic individualism".
Fabien Danesi
In Working Class Rehab [2008], you liken the playmates of an erotic magazine, such as Playboy, to working women. This implies that the proletariat no longer exists as it was originally defined — within the working-class world — but has shifted towards the world of spectacle, towards a world of glamour and glitz.
Isabelle Lutz
This painting offers an allegory that establishes a link between Marxist thought and contemporary ideology purporting to champion individual freedom. The aim was to transpose the concepts of "class consciousness" and "reification" in order to present woman as the emblematic figure of a "new proletariat". Here, relations between men and women would be codified by the rules of the dominant, and determined by hidden interests.
Fabien Danesi
I’m going to try to push you to your limits. What’s very complicated is knowing whether we can still say today that these Playmates are exploited. Generally, these women, most of whom belong to the American middle class, choose to apply to appear naked in glossy magazines. Where is the element of alienation and domination in such cases?
Isabelle Lutz
When she accepts these benefits, the "Fisher-Price woman", even though she remains the holder of her own desire, concedes a significant portion of her autonomy and relinquishes her responsibility towards the community. She comes to covet "her servitude as if it were her salvation" [Deleuze and Guattari], even though her status as a fetish also confers a genuine power upon her over the one whose need is growing.
Fabien Danesi
Exactly! If they are exploited, it is not against their will, but rather with their consent. These women subscribe to a cheap dream, the "fake" dream of our capitalist society.
Isabelle Lutz
At this stage, it’s a matter of individual choice, which, to be honest, leaves me rather indifferent. On the other hand, when individual freedom causes collateral damage, I find it much harder not to pass judgement.
Fabien Danesi
What do you mean by that?
Isabelle Lutz
Quite simply that a society is enriched by emancipated individuals who are capable of balancing personal fulfilment with collective responsibility. By succumbing to the easy option of purely self-centred compensation, woman undermines the wider female community.
Fabien Danesi
Isn’t that a way of owning the fact of working within pop culture? I find your works have a somewhat strident edge, but also a seductive quality. Some of your paintings make explicit reference to a world of entertainment. I’m thinking of the piece called Lucy’s Peek-a-Boo, where the viewer is immersed in a leisure-oriented society. Similarly, I would associate your work with pop culture through the depictions where you reference brands, such as Caterpillar or Royal Canin.
Isabelle Lutz
It’s a way of thinking about my era in a contemporary context, hence the brands, quotations or references to cinema.
Fabien Danesi
Can you give a few examples?
Isabelle Lutz
Organik Circus is a nod to the Poiraud brothers’ film Atomik Circus, Sweetie & the Hotpatooties to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Lullaby Pop’ n’Roll to the film Vivre sa vie [Godard]... Lucy’s Peek-a-Boo refers to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and Makeda & the Tricksters to CocoRosie’s song Bisounours.
Fabien Danesi
You explicitly place yourself within the culture of entertainment, pop culture, so-called "mass" culture. But perhaps that term is a bit outdated nowadays...
Isabelle Lutz
No, the term is still relevant, as far as I’m concerned. I see myself as a child of my time, a raw product, shaped by the culture of "fast dream–easy spleen".
Fabien Danesi
How do you view 1960s pop art, artists like Warhol or James Rosenquist who drew on advertising and used brands in their paintings? Is this a direct lineage that you embrace?
Isabelle Lutz
No, I don't really perceive any lineage. It’s a movement that interests me visually speaking.
Fabien Danesi
Why does it interest you visually? Because of its effectiveness?
Isabelle Lutz
For the stimulation it offers. It’s a matter of sensory excitation. But to move beyond the surface of things, I need an emotional foundation: more poetry or violence...
Fabien Danesi
You mentioned the notion of becoming surreptitiously. I get the impression that it’s very important to you, that it’s the movement, the journey, that should be prioritised.
Isabelle Lutz
Mobility allows me to expand my scope of exploration and my field of inquiry. It is also the prerequisite for a multifaceted way of thinking, resistant to social atony. Even today, I continue to operate within the necessity of contestation, in a certain romantic tradition inherited from ’68.
Fabien Danesi
How much of a role does provocation play in your work?
Isabelle Lutz
Yes, I like and respond to provocation if it is accompanied by insight; that is to say, if it exposes wrongdoing. But when it is driven strictly by a regressive compulsion, it bores me rather quickly.
Fabien Danesi
Do you think it is still possible to intervene in a transgressive manner?
Isabelle Lutz
Yes, certainly. The art that matters to me involves challenging all established values, breaking away, in particular, from the neoliberal discourse that urges the individual to think in terms of the market economy. It is art that serves as a tool of resistance.
Fabien Danesi
I recently read a book by the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich entitled L’élite artiste. She writes that in the field of contemporary creation there is "a headlong rush into critical compulsion, the idea that authentic art could obviously have no aim other than a subversive one, no other justifications than moral — political and moral — and that aesthetic pleasure alone could not sustain the powerful ambitions with which it finds itself burdened as representative of the value of marginality". She emphasises that, since the second half of the 19th century, modern art has abandoned classical canons of legitimation such as beauty, in favour of dimensions of originality and subversion. She notes that transgression — the non-normative — has become the norm.
Isabelle Lutz
I continue to believe in the influence of active minorities, even if utopia only rarely translates into social progress. I like to think that, beyond aesthetic concerns, art that strives to expose conditioning might be capable of mitigating the harmful effects of a socio-cultural standardisation that simplifies our relationship to the world. As for transgression proper, I also feel that since 1968 we have witnessed a gradual shift in its sphere of action, somewhat as if, after operating on the fringes of the institution, subversion had infiltrated the meshwork of the system to spread to the very heart of normativity and, perhaps, to transcend its narrow horizons. Be that as it may, I find my work alternative rather than truly transgressive. I adopt a stance that explores social relations understood in terms of power dynamics, given that the themes addressed deal primarily with domination and resignation. That said, while it is fashionable to recognise individualism within a competitive economic logic, moving away from it might constitute a deviation that nevertheless remains within the norm, since "class solidarity" is, it seems to me, being consolidated under the guise of neoliberalism.
Fabien Danesi, Vivoequidem, 2009.
︎︎︎︎︎︎
AN INTERVIEW WITH LANDESCAPE ART REVIEW
Hello Isabelle, and a warm welcome to LandEscape. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? And moreover, what could be the features that mark the contemporaneity of an artwork?
Isabelle Lutz
It is difficult to answer; everything is relative and therefore justifiable. I do not know how to grasp such a vast field, without sacrificing what, in my eyes, in fact, builds all its richness: its complexity. Let us say that what matters to me in art, is primarily the process from intentionality to conceptualisation, the movement between affect and reason, the balance between instinct and control even if, and therein lies the paradox, it turns out that I am very easily seduced or over-stimulated by images. I guess however, that all the works of art that resonate with me meet a deeply unconscious need for poetry. I tend to think that our time of "fast dream-easy spleen" is more permissive; postmodernism seems to have increased the limits of the possible while freeing tself, among others, from the burden of tradition, from the notion of excellence or the need for authenticity. More than a simply liberating evolution, in my opinion, it's really a social foundation suitable for alternative practices and uninhibited creativity.
LandEscape
Would you like to tell us something about your background? I have read that besides your architectural studies, you hold a Master of Science [in Psychology]: are there particular experiences that have impacted on the way you produce your art nowadays?
Isabelle Lutz
After studying psychology, I practised several years as a psychotherapist. In between, I fluttered around, from one area of activity to another, without ever really investing myself in long term activities. Then, at age 30, I chose to become a painter. This "coming out" propelled me overnight into a universe that I knew nothing about, while exposing myself to the conversion of a gaze — my own — from the intimate to the collective. From the outset, I placed my work under the sign of discontinuity, given my need to reassess my sense of belonging, as if it were about drawing from separation an experience of singularity. I would say that my architecture studies introduced me to the geometrism and the evocative power of curves. In contrast, I think I kept some reflexes from psychology; I frequently use paradoxical injunctions to support my thoughts. It is a way of considering the world in a double bind, of increasing the density of the real and setting aside the obvious to gain some freedom of movement.
LandEscape
Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on in your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
Isabelle Lutz
At first it is always very confusing and abstract. There is no real development upstream. I instrumentalise fantasy, or any other manifestation related to the expression of a desire, through associations of ideas. In my mind, images almost exclusively stem from the lexicon, and therefore from thoughts. I manipulate words, syntax, sounds. And then the concept asserts itself and the work takes shape, receding from language. At this point, I work instinctively, in the urgency of the gesture, under the diktat of the body and its tensions. Everything is at stake in the moment. I simply let go, and projects follow one another in a serene continuity.
LandEscape
Now let's focus on your artworks: I would like to start with the recent Vaginal Stressless, that our readers have admired in the starting pages of this article: I would suggest that our readers jump directly to isabellelutz.com and have a more complete idea of this stimulating series... In the meanwhile, could you take us through your creative process when starting this project ?
Isabelle Lutz
After having only questioned the female in an exclusively subjective perspective, I wanted to introduce the male in my work. With this project, opting for toys at first glance rudimentary and very colourful, I was quickly confronted with a difficulty: how to avoid the trap of one-upmanship — that is, responding to the absurd with more absurdity! And I realised that after all these years of painting and suggesting basically a phallic and fetishistic representation of woman, my stance was not so different with this series of photographs: the sexual object dimension remains obvious, as well as the surpassing attempt. The subject or object exists ultimately only through a formatting that deprives it of a significant part of its substance. More formally, it was also the opportunity to introduce a different pace — faster, less laborious — than that of my usual painting, which participates in the alchemy of slowness.
LandEscape
An important and recurrent feature of your works, that I can recognize especially in your paintings, is a deep emotional and intellectual involvement, that in my opinion forces the spectator to draw on their own personal experience... What do you try to communicate through your work and what role does your audience play in your process? When you conceive an artwork do you think about those who will enjoy it?
Isabelle Lutz
It is true that, in choosing to situate my work within a feminist framework and positioning myself within a critical approach, I am personally committed as an individual. Each painting or project builds on everything that precedes it and fits into an ensemble still taking shape, offering space as a metaphor for the social field. While the desire and intention to establish a dialogue have been present from the beginning, I nevertheless do not really concern myself with the reaction of others, perhaps because I spend most of my time in the tranquillity of my atelier.
LandEscape
By the way, a recurrent visual of your paintings that has particularly impacted on me is the nuance of intense red: any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?
Isabelle Lutz
In fact, the scenes are chromatically dense and the decor generally bounded by monochrome shades. I work the contrasts so that they clash. I use the strength of oppositions to try to obtain a visual impact and to artificially maintain some tension around an equilibrium point. The red? I think it is primarily a matter of affinity: I like the resonance and intensity of this colour.
LandEscape
I would now like to turn to Aldi's Chickens in Love, and especially the recent A Kiss & A Frog, that has impressed me very much: could you lead our readers through the development of these projects?
Isabelle Lutz
Aldi's Chickens in Love is an empirical video and an aesthetic romantic-burlesque exercise, featuring a love story between chickens and a female character, to say the least alienated, plagued by persecutory ideation... Concerning A Kiss & A Frog, I participated in the project "telephone" in collaboration with the Satellite Collective of NY. I had to translate a collage made by a Dutch artist in order to induce the original message and to transmit it to three other artists living respectively in Portland, San Diego and Providence. At the end of the experiment, several exhibitions to highlight the inner workings of this transference are planned in 2014 in Europe and the United States.
LandEscape
Your artworks have been exhibited in many countries, from Switzerland, your native country, to the USA, from France to the United Kingdom, where you currently live and work: what experiences have you had exhibiting in different countries? What are the differences — if any — between exhibiting in Europe and exhibiting in America? Do you think that there is a clear difference between the European scenario and the American one?
Isabelle Lutz
I guess the differences are significant. I noticed, since I moved to London, that the Anglo-Saxon mentality through its long tradition of commitment and its offbeat cultural sensitivity is favourable to me; my work is far better received and I feel myself more in tune with my social environment.
LandEscape
There's a "cliché" question, that I often ask to the artists that I happen to interview, and I have to say that even though it might sound the simplest one, it often gives rise to the most complex answers: what aspect of your work do you enjoy the most? What gives you the biggest satisfaction?
Isabelle Lutz
Intransigence — the will not to take the easiest path, to compel oneself towards as rigorous a process of cognitive elaboration as possible, and to continue to take risks while flirting with the kitsch, the absurd, the banal, in order to prospect towards the collision of images. Not to know, ultimately, and not to worry too much.
LandEscape
Thank you for your time and for sharing with us your thoughts, Isabelle. My last question deals with your future plans: anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?
Isabelle Lutz
I will continue to question the power of the image while focusing on the poetics of cities and absence with my next project, Pop Love Crush, a series of photographs that should let me drift for a while between Berlin, Geneva and London. And there is still room for improvisation...
Landscape art review, 2013.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MALIKA ALI
Hello Isabelle, and a warm welcome to #ElectricWalls here in Los Angeles, a celebration of contemporary video art featuring a global assortment of digital works that push the bundaries of the moving image. I would start this interview with an introductory question: can you talk about the origins of Vaginal Stressless? What inspired this work?
Isabelle Lutz
Vaginal Stressless is a proposal aiming to image the intimacy of bodies as a key value of modernity; a body which now is acting as a factor of differentiation, as a boundary marker between oneself and the other. Here, the phallus as a focal point becomes an entity in its own right, attribute and object, specificity and generality, while remaining frozen in an interior space devoid of perspective, reflecting a reversal of values, an instrumentalisation of the masculine to enhance the feminine. The problem of contemporary alienation is framed as being the result of a movement in which individuals operate in a precarious position between different normative constraints and cultural pressures. Thus, the specimen-object exists ultimately only through a formatting that deprives it of a rather sizeable portion of its substance, while the female character, staged in the video, is plagued by persecutory ideation and undergoes her sexual image while owning it — that is to say, without trying to flee the situation. So, after all these years of painting and suggesting a fetishistic representation of woman, and after having, for the first time, introduced a man into my work, I realised that the stance I had taken was not so different: it was not about advocating a logic of collective emancipation but rather to highlight an individual path to say the least singular, reporting a dialectical relationship between the culture of the self and instinctual investment.
Malika Ali
Does the raw chicken [to be found in the video] have significance? If so, please explain.
Isabelle Lutz
It was, for me, a way of combining carnivorous symbolism and a morbid dimension around a romantic-burlesque axis carrying a somewhat shrill charge, without thereby ruling out any seductive effect. Chicken meat appears twitching, somewhat pathetic, even painful, while woman's flesh offers itself to the viewer whilealso challenging him and confronting his own gaze, which creates the possibility of exceeding the woman-object duality and, consequently, a refusal of enslavement. That said, I frequently make use of paradoxical injunctions to support my thinking and lay the groundwork for what could be related to an attempt to appropriate the real. It's a way of thinking about the world in a double bind, of making the improbable denser and of setting aside the obvious to gain freedom of movement.
Malika Ali
What is the connection between the chickens and the vibrators?
Isabelle Lutz
Let's say that what matters to me in art is primarily the whole process from intentionality to conceptualisation: the movement between affect and reason or, in this case, the balance between the vulnerability of the flesh and the coldness of the object; and, in order to flirt with kitsch, the absurd, the banal, to prospect towards the collision of images and perhaps venture to the dark side of transgression, halfway between poetry and violence.
Malika Ali
Are there cultural references inherent in this piece that our American audience may have missed?
Isabelle Lutz
Not particularly. My work follows on from the continuation of entertainment culture. I tend to think that our age of "fast dream-easy spleen" is more permissive; postmodernism seems to me to have increased the possibilities by overcoming many constraints linked, among others, to tradition or to the concept of excellence. More than a simply liberating evolution, it's really, in my opinion, a social foundation conducive to alternative and uninhibited creativity. From a purely formal point of view, the references that guide my personal reflections result from my career. Psychologist by training, it is difficult for me to mask the influence of sociology and political commitment which are inherent to my approach. The topics addressed almost exclusively attempt to initiate a dialogue around the concept of gender, and thus to apprehend individuals as constituting the inseparable elements of a system to be observed in its overall operation, while considering femininity as the product of a hierarchised, politicised social relationship. I focus mainly on power dynamics, seeking, insofar as possible, to highlight the ambivalence of contemporary society where the dividing line between alienation and emancipation has become more uncertain. The anchor point — at least the conscious anchor point — of my approach lies in an assertive will to question the power of the image, to put the universality of male domination on trial, without thereby allowing myself to be locked into communitarian claims, understood as a founding principle of feminism in its many variations, sometimes contradictory and often controversial. I like to think, ultimately, that beyond the aesthetic concern, a work of art that manages to deconstruct some cultural conditioning might be able to moderate the damaging effects of socio-cultural uniformity that simplifies too much, for my taste, our relationship with the world.
Malika Ali
Since you are a multi-disciplinary artist, does your approach to your work change depending on the medium? If so, please tell us how.
Isabelle Lutz
At first it is always very vague and abstract, whatever the chosen medium is. There is no real development upstream, except that each project builds on everything that precedes it and becomes integrated into an ensemble still taking shape, offering a space as a metaphor for the social field. I instrumentalise fantasy, or any other manifestation related to the expression of desire, working through associations of ideas, while never losing sight of the critical perspective I want to develop. In my mind, the image derives almost exclusively from the lexicon, and therefore from thought. I manipulate concepts. So, the idea asserts itself, the work takes shape, receding from language, under the diktat of the body and its tensions, in the moment — in the instinct.
Malika Ali
Part of the reason I am attracted to your body of work is the glossiness and feminine overtones of your still and moving images. Can you shed light on your production and post process i.e. lighting and camera techniques, wardrobe, production design, filters etc.? For example, why the choice of patent leather, high gloss red boots in Vaginal Stressless? How do you achieve that overall sheen and polish that is indicative of your style?
Isabelle Lutz
In fact, I like to compose with contrasts, setting them against one another. I use the strength of oppositions to achieve visual impact, where it arises, and to artificially maintain some tension around an equilibrium point. My aesthetic choices reveal two antinomic dimensions, playful and coercive in nature. In this video, the latex tights — essential accessories of the brand "très bonjour — the finest in latex fashion design and fetish couture clothing from Berlin" — imposed themselves as self-evident, as a reference to the fashion world, towards a universe of glamour and glitz. It was also a nod to the city where I had the chance to live and that continues to feed my artistic work. Red? This is firstly a matter of affinity: I like the intensity of this color. Black/white work, meanwhile, meets more refined aesthetic criteria where light, often natural, dresses the contours of the object with a touch of femininity, a lustrous note that nuances the sharp, rough edge of the piece's stance. And finally, always the same desire for stimulation, variations on the theme of sensory excitement...
Malika Ali
Why is your piece titled Vaginal Stressless?
Isabelle Lutz
The image in my artistic research works like a rebus with a strong semiotic resonance. Titles are involved in the phenomenon, since these are usually nominal sentences, playing on words, syntax or sounds. You will then easily understand my reluctance to explain them, given that they are, in my opinion, just as important as representation.
On the ground floor L.A., Malika Ali, 2014.