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| Artist's Statement |
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It's like a prison…
First, you believe it's enough to work on what's behind the bars in order to work it out.
Doesn't quite work, it's stiff. So, you try to make it look a little bit more lively. But you're not happy with the look only; there are still prison bars that make you see the world split. You know one day, you should be able to see this and to enter it. So, you start working on people and how to split things in a nicer way. You chop tigers,…men, put the pieces together again, you rebuild them another way.
Demolition-reconstruction, you can rebuild anything this way. But there are still the prison bars, and then, what to do?
What to do, que faire?
You can't go any further you are at a dead end, there is nothing eye to explore, it's horrible, beyond words.
There is just that grid, prison bars.
And you realize this is what is to be explored: How does it work?
This was the point: how does the grid work?
Understand the structure.
What you had seen through it-without understanding it-was just surface!
Explosive paradox. The day you understand how it works is a glorious day, and you can shoot the grid! Shot dead structure (or blossoming?)
Now you are the master of the prison, and the bars are your toys. You can do anything you want with them. You can open or make it loose or you can undo it. You can play with it forever.
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| Reviews |
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This is not my Body
Artistic creation is a quest in which necessity (of expression) and urgency (of the moment) are experienced through a search for a medium, subject, space, form. It may be playful, dramatic, conceptual or spiritual, but above all it seeks to convey a revelation that our senses will finally be able to perceive and understand.
Nicole Dufour, a visual artist who keeps her formal options open, lures us into the revelation game using markers that map the visual course of her creations and take us into the unsettling intimate worlds of the senses. The intense embroidery of Jours sur toile, subtle graphics of Circuits and Vichyssitudes and baroque photomontages of Images pieuses are based on codes that grow stronger as they frame a labyrinth into which we are irresistibly drawn.
What stories does she tell?
In the Jours sur toile series, Dufour employs embroidery “days” like the reserve technique in painting. Immaculate embroidery, symbol of purity of medium, forms, subject and hands, is reversed as the Jours sur toile deteriorate into red female blood, cuts and scarification, like masks of initiation or sacrifice, or clothes that shield, or perhaps constrict. They allude to the naked body, male or female, questioning our sexuality all the more provocatively because of the fragility, frailness and destructibility of the medium.
The Circuits, revolving shards of a personal calligraphy developed during Dufour's years in Asia, are landscapes of an enigma. Their fleeting play of appearance-disappearance pulls us irresistibly in, forcing us to participate in the work of art. Each piece is a maze that is itself part of an open puzzle with limitless borders. The tropism of the circular movements brings us face to face with a gallery of portraits questioning our existence, disconcerting us as they fade and reappear in rhythm with our visual confusion.
In her Images pieuses, Dufour is an object of her own creation, not the subject of a kind of self-fiction or photographical novel. The seemingly glorifying halo, which recalls the spiral in the Circuits, is the veritable thread of the narrative. It is the main character though not the central figure. As the iconic face and body of a series of vibrant “multiples,” Dufour stages (and portrays) ritual situations in (ordinary and extraordinary) life that challenge our perceptions of the everyday. Her mischievousness is intensified by a hypnotic sense of humour rare among visual artists.
Through a wide range of subjects and media, and masterful execution, Dufour reveals the curiosity and freedom that inspire her exploration and creativity. Her work disturbs and confronts with visible, yet subverted, signs of our identity. Caught in the traps she has laid, we begin to question, but too late. Fascinated, we have already been led down the paths into the labyrinths and enigmas.
This is where we find her, and it is along these paths that we are drawn to walk with her.
Yves Bescond
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