Karine Chavas and the veil of nudity
Suddenly canceling the civilizing effect of garments, via a certain form of bondage, – but not only – Karine Chavas questions nudity that has never really been tamed, eroticizing even the laws that come to ban it.
Each image embraces the body with a sense of pictoriality, erasing as much the fabric that encloses a face dedicated to the demanding virginity of the nuns as that which pretends to hide the so-called dishonoring girls.
From the veil of nudity emerges a true identity of “cubism”. It plays on a simultaneous rendering of intimate and public facets. Intimacy is not reshaped according to nature: it is enriched by a succession of pauses.
Karine Chavas invites to a symbolic, scholarly and brutal archaeological dig. In the dark depths one can look for the image of another woman, whom one would have rubbed shoulders with perhaps, at least obviously dreamed of.
The ambiguous gaze on the no less ambiguous status of femininity arises in a society always eager for compartmentalization and durability. The artist gives us to see the salutary and deleterious work of undermining true freedom. The one that melts and breaks, the one that is revealed tends to occupy all the space and create a void around oneself.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
