Nathalie Harvey's Solo Show From 19 november to friday 15 january 2010 Lot 10 opens its gallery doors to welcome the exhibition "J'adore votre nombril !".

Photos

Program

Painting, as Picasso explained “is this never-ending battle to exceed oneself -- the painter, like the toreador must go down into the arena and confront the bull”, whether it be real or symbolic. In her new exhibition, “I love your belly button,” Nathalie Harvey subscribes to this tradition of no indulgence for art: this is about a fight between the self and the self, to make reality splash back in its brutality … and especially in its beauty.

In her new exhibition “I love your belly button” we recognize first her captivating colours which hit, provoke or seduce the eyes. From turquoise blue to emerald green passing through yellow ochre, the artist’s body becomes a battle field, with correspondences of colours that evoke the aesthetics of a Delacroix and the odalisques of the XIXth century.

Nathalie Harvey is not a theoretician, and so much the better. We find in her work, all of painting’s strength, this mystery of representation, which calls out to the senses as much as to the intellect. Her body is there, nude, palpable, declined endlessly. Her mouths, wide open, remind us of Francis Bacon in their animalism, And those eyes which are really a mirror to the soul. “La Nageuse” (The Swimmer) looks straight at you. Her bathing suit (or her underwear in other paintings) is more real than the other body parts. “Everything that is there but that I do not see” sums up the artist. The painting becomes shadowy. Here lives the quest of the artist: to seize her identity by putting herself on stage, into a situation, into danger.

“The Me is hateable”, said Blaise Pascale. The philosopher did not know that he opened thus a path, for artists claiming a subjectivity that would become the heart of Modernity.
Hate of one’s little self, of one’s limits, can be the motor to overtake the reasonable, the rational, (everything that Nathalie Harvey detests). Her paintings are loaded with an undeniable power: the one of risk-taking. The artist draws her inspiration from instinct, from the carnal, and from the torments of her own ego….at risk of losing her mind. Her “I” then becomes the opportunity for a game, a game of masks, a game of geese, with schizophrenia as a safeguard, and the overcoming of the self as a horizon. In her “Killers” series, (“Tueuses”), the artist sets the scene for a face to face battle with herself, like the heroine from a Tarentino film. The tight framing of her first self-portraits opens up to the whole body, in a position that is both one of defense and of attack. The shoulders are dislocated from the body, raised up to the ears. Colours reveal this combat, blue giving up room to a shrill red, only to get back on its feet as an emerald green. “This girl on the canvas, looking at me was becoming too violent in the other me, outside the studio. I had to kill her;” Art as catharsis, is not just a question of words. Nathalie Harvey, we know it, almost lost her own skin.

In “Auto sauteuse”, (“Auto jumper”), a woman with an orange face, mouth wide open, jumps over another one of her selves, a dull, discrete girl with a timid smile. In psychoanalytical terms, we could talk about the superego over overcoming the me. But one must look elsewhere. It is in fact the mystery of femininity that interests the artist. The femininity of her “Mona Lisas” (“Jocondes”) series, pop-trash version: One only needs to let oneself be captivated by her Charlie Brown style smile. Or by her “Light Women” (Femmes Légères), like this heroine running on the wall with her cape, her hair in the wind, and her fists tight. Another variation on the painting, “Rien”, (“Nothing”): the artist represents her from the back, probably scanning the horizon. An appeasing blue envelops her. We cannot see her eyes, only a cigarette’s smoke going up in a spiral, like a Miles Davis tune, an improvisation. “I is another”, said Rimbaud. “I work to make myself clairvoyant. The suffering is enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet and I recognized myself as a poet.” Nathalie Harvey, recognized herself as painter.