A fleur de peau : mémoire d’un défilé éphémere, this is the title of Karine Saporta‘s exhibition which is on until January 7 at the Museum of Fine Arts and Lace. She presents it like this:
The art of lace is infinitely similar to my two practices: dance and photography. Like photography, the effects of shade and transparency are one of the major subjects of lace work. Clarity dialogues with opacity to create a language. The number of variations constituting the lacemakers’ technique makes this language more refined.
Like dance, each work of lace is a fluid architecture based on a clever treatment of the relationship between fullness and emptiness. Filled, point-to-hole, filled-clear gauze etc. all these technical designations remind us, if necessary, that the success of a piece rests on the subtle balance between what is and what is not. Lace work defies nothingness.
Between presence and absence… of the material everything comes into play during the manufacturing of a piece of lace. If the spacing of the points regulates the density of the presence, the thread of the lacemakers in the phase of creating the “network” borders the zones of absence. The “bridles” structure and divide nothingness.
Once the work is completed, this clever partition of empty and full spaces explains the symbolic dimension specific to the art of lace. The alternation of what masks and what reveals depends on it. The art of lace is a language.
Even more, the art of lace goes back to the very origin of language.
Indeed, according to Freud, it is precisely through this play between disappearance and reappearance (to sight) that access to language is built from early childhood. The theory of Fort-Da (part-income) that Freud developed, after observing his grandson playing at making a reel appear and disappear under a bed, comes to the very root of the symbolic register. It is in the representation of the absence and the return to the presence (of the mother) that this is constituted. At the same time as the relationship to neediness is structured, that is to say… to desire. The art of lace is dizzying in its always potentially erotic content. Through this game where frustration and satisfaction of “voyeuristic” desire collide… Whether it is bare skin or… a house whose interior is hidden from the street…
Karine Saporta
Karine Saporta : A fleur de peau : mémoire d’un défilé éphémere
until January 7, 2024
Musée des Beaux Arts et de la Dentelle
(Salle d’exposition temporaire du musée)
Cour Carrée de la Dentelle
61000 Alençon
https://museedentelle.cu-alencon.fr/
