Assise sur la langue d'une grenouille, exposition personelle, galerie du Haut-Pavé, Paris, 2025
The body and its utopian core
‘The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine.’
(Michel Foucault, 1966, The utopian body)
In this series of large-scale paintings spread over three years, the artist continues her experiments with the figuration or impossible figuration of the body, with a passionate interest in what Brauner called the ‘morphological war of man’ and its procession of metamorphic images, driven by the processes of displacement, distortion, attraction and coalescence that affect the human anatomy.
All the more so as the body is engaged in strange migrations, bound for universes where fantasy is given total freedom. It is present everywhere, even when absent or erased, always transfigured by incredible, vibrant, electric colours and bathed in hallucinatory, psychedelic or caustic lighting, refusing to accept the traditional, patriarchal objectification of the male gaze.
She also does this as a ‘semionaut’ artist (Nicolas Bourriaud). She produces itineraries through familiar signs, forms and images, cultural references, the codes of legends, tales, comic strips and advertising, all of which she mischievously branches off, hijacking with a humour all her own, pushing them to the limit, to the point of derision and sarcasm, that form of laughter which, according to its etymology, ‘tears the flesh’, a biting irony.
It's a quest in which we can be sensitive to the freedom of the shapes and drawings, to the treatment, even the exasperation of the colours, to the diversity of the entries in ‘the graphic parable of the human condition’ …but above all it challenges our gaze as to the enigmatic object that drives the artist's research and gesture.
The point from which this gesture springs, a knot of soul, thought and desire, is always a point on the body, a place of urgent, burning questions: what is it? Where is it? What can it do? Foucault evokes his ‘pitiless place’: It will always be where I am, and that is the source of an unsurpassable suffering, captured every morning in the mirror; it will never respond to the utopia where I would like to be and yet all these utopias and dreams of the body that wants to escape from itself find their origin and their point of application in this body. It takes one to work against it, and it is this work that establishes the relationship between its suffering and its desire – desire is this third dimension: through desire my body is always elsewhere, linked to all the other places in the world, to the point of being elsewhere than in the world.
Such is the utopian core of the body, a three-dimensional sequence of the body’s experience, to be kept warm within the body, a compass to orient oneself in Anna Ditscherlein’s very pleasant migrations of the body.
Georges Quidet, HCE Gallery
Pariser Licht (Parisian Light), 3W1F space (artists' association), Dresden, 2025 (group show), photos: Peter Zuber