LES OMBRES QUE NOUS SOMMES : Katia Bourdarel

It is under the sign of night and nature that the new canvases of Katia Bourdarel, presented at the Marais space of the Sator gallery, are placed. Black dominates here: a nocturnal theater of metamorphoses. Vegetal metamorphoses in which fragments of trees and intertwined nudes move, women as nymphs and original goddesses—here Daphne, there Dryope or the Heliades… And thus we are plunged into an inner forest imbued with mysticism and myths. An echo of an ancestral nature perceived as a return to origins, revealing troubling truths.

The representation of the body in Katia Bourdarel’s work finds its foundations in a classical tradition that is constantly subverted, filtered through the present and its vertigo. In her work, beauty—and everything it carries of ideal, paradise, joy, light, flowers—remains deeply ambivalent. Monstrous. Troubling. A monstrous beauty already present in earlier canvases where the artist depicts bound, constrained, enclosed, transformed bodies. In the current works, the same ambiguity persists.

“Here,” the artist tells us, “bodies at dusk transform in a slow motion interrupted within an ambiguous image: a desire to hold onto the fleeting moment, to slow down, to embody slowness, to take a step aside, toward another path.” Faces double. Bodies mutate, dissolve, stretch, and transform into enigmatic presences. In this movement of the image, any fixed meaning escapes us. Painting opens up and questions us. It is like that starry night depicted by the artist: stars? fireflies? electric lights lost in the foliage? It fades as much as it illuminates. A fairy-tale of the absurd. A sanctuary of aborted celebrations. It reveals as much as it conceals. A withered prayer. A lost sun.

Amélie Adamo