Like a dancing dog: in Rome, at Villa Medici, the solo exhibition of Natacha Lesueur

On stage at theAcadémie de France at Villa Medici in Rome, from October 13, 2021 to January 9, 2022, is the solo exhibition of French artist Natacha Lesueur (Cannes, 1971) entitled Come un cane ballerino: the review traces thirty years of the artist’s career, who, moreover, was herself a Villa Medici fellow between 2002 and 2003. Natacha Lesueur’s work is essentially photographic: her artistic interests revolve around the body, appearance and the intimate relationship between the body and its interiority. Through a series of images constructed as paintings, the body is subjected to different treatments that simultaneously detect constriction, staging and masquerade.

Curated by Christian Bernard, the exhibition takes the form of a visual and thematic narrative that brings together more than eighty of the artist’s works, both historical and new, offering an intimate look at his work around the image and his plastic and political intentions. The ironic dimension of the title, borrowed from Virginia Woolf ’s book A Room of One’s Own, is meant to express her awareness as a woman artist and sets the tone for an exhibition where the incongruous and the extravagant are treated with the utmost seriousness.

From the earliest historical works (1993-1998), to the very recent fairy-bride series(Les humeurs des fées, 2020-21), via works dedicated to Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda, a legendary figure in 1940s Hollywood cinema, representations of the feminine inhabit the exhibition, often disturbing, always ambiguous. Through interventions on the distinctive identity markers, envelopes of hair and clothing, vehicles and symbols of the masquerades of femininity, through the exploration of attributed roles and normative models (bride, mother, princess, actress, dancer, etc.) through the subversion of impositions to beauty, youth or thinness, Natacha Lesueur seeks to reveal, not without humor, the manifestations of the expression of a social and cultural constraint. Stifling hairstyles, accessorized hair, XXL make-up, and food posturing are all recurring enigmas in the paintings-narratives exhibited at Villa Medici.

Like a Dancing Dog also intends to transcend the boundaries of the photographic medium to explore other aspects of Natacha Lesueur’s artistic production: ceramic sculpture-fountains, terracotta vases, drawings and video works punctuate the exhibition, in dialogue with the photographic series, as a way of interrogating the experience of the image and the fixity of forms. Enigmatic figures of fairies and brides or familiar female portraits that expose themselves to the gaze and at the same time elude it: the exhibition also seeks to offer a personal and cultural female genealogy of the artist, “a multiple body of work, unfolding in a path punctuated by her singular uses of the strange and the ambiguous,” to borrow curator Christian Bernard’s words.

Pictured: Natacha Lesueur, Fée tachée, from the series Les humeurs des fées (2020; graphite lead monotype on photographic proof, 43 x 63 cm)

Like a dancing dog: in Rome, at Villa Medici, the solo exhibition of Natacha Lesueur

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