artscape.fr

Gillian Wearing, Confessions/Portraits, vidéos

Until November 1, 2009

(Avoid the queues: buy your tickets on line while clicking here!)

Museum Rodin, 79, rue de Varenne 75007,6€

In counterpoint of the temporary exhibition on “the factory of the portrait” at Rodin, the Rodin museum presents two vidéos of Gillian Wearing. A British artist (born in 1963 in Birmingham), who gained prestigious Turner Prize (1997) and which was the subject of a personal exposure to the museum of Modern art of the Town of Paris (2001), “Under Influence”. For the Rodin museum, it presents new a video, Secrets and Lies (2009), new version of Confess All One Video. Don' T Worry You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Cal Gillian (1994) and Trauma (2000) - contemporary vision of the human nature via the portrait, delivered without care…

Two visiting rooms invite the spectator to enter the intimacy of the testimonys delivered on screen by volunteers recruited by classified (Secrecies and Lies), speaking freely about their own experience Confess All One Video. Don' T Worry You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Gillian cal, 1994) or by actors.

In each one of his vidéos, an individual carries a grotesque mask (Trauma), black on a white skin, appears female for a speaker and conversely, or a disguise (Confess All One Video). To be able to deliver without taboo its traumatisms, its wounds (Trauma) or an act/an activity illegal (E) (drug, prostitution, flight).

Between voyeurism of the spectator and exhibistionnism partial of the transmitter protected by the mask, Gillian Wearing takes again the principle of TV-reality to apply it to the practice of the portrait. The artist borrows the codes of the Christian religion - the visiting room where the sinner confesses himself -, of the psychoanalysis - to exteriorize its wounds to heal them -, and of anthropology - study of the human nature -. Gillian scrambles the borders between deprived public space/and reality/fiction, by having recourse at the same time to ordinary people and actors.

These vidéos exposes the tension which underlies the concepts of individual or identity and image or social representation. Contrary to pictorial or sculptural art, the face of portraituré is not carrying emotions, hidden by the mask, but they are transferred on and by the word, released. By the evils of others, the artist thus puts the spectator vis-a-vis his own fears. The result is poignant, disconcerting.