September 27th - November 9th 2019
Sans titre (2016)
33 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin
75010 Paris
France
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