Ariane Lopez-Huici and Michel Auder at AC Project Room - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Voyeurism, exhibitionism, transgression and the dynamics of the eroticized gaze were among the issues raised by dint of this probing two-person show. For her part, Ariane Lopez-Huici presented a pair of recent projects: TOAK, a silent, tightly framed videotaped dance that was intensely, flat fiercely, performed by the artist, and Aviva, a series of photographs picturing a majestically obese stark naked woman whose monumental presence summons the Venus of Willendorf and other cthonic, matriarchal deities. Lopez-Huici's video and photographs were addition ed by Michel Auder's video (shot in 1976 re-edited in 1994) also in black and white, of the late Hannah Wilke.

The mix of still and moving images created a sexually charged atmosphere in which, single couldn't help noticing, the protagonists refused to engage the viewer's organ of sight Yet despite the lack of organ of vision contact with the camera, Hannah Wilke showed herself conscious of its gaze. She plays to the camera, to Auder's (male) regard and to the viewer as she performs a moderate seductive and ironic strip tease, using, among other accessories, a statue of an androgynous child (Amor?) as a foil.

In contrast to Auder's piece, Lopez-Huici, in her black-and-white videotape (shot by the agency of Chrystel Egal), tums the camera upon herself in an act of auto-voyeurism. Assuming the part of an anxiously frenzied maenad or martyr, she is filmed hurling herself against an unyielding, standing metal statuary (Although not identified, it is by the agency of Alain Kirili.) The vulnerable muscle and fat of her naked body is pitted against the cutting, adamant material. She clings to her priapic antagonist, twists and weaves about it, rejecting and resuming to the statuary again and again in a following of abrupt, angular, exposed motions Throughout, Lopez-Huici's attention is obsessively center upon herself and her relationship with this metallic surrogate other. She spars with the plastic art in an agon wrapped in harsh, dramatic shadows, jagged transitions in lighting and grainy film fabrics whose broken rhythms flicker with seconds of unlikely grace. Desire here is frett ardent, challenging, seeking.

The Aviva portraits, upon the other hand, are virtually flawless, the lights and darks finely modulated and balanced. The artist has plant off the model's abundant, corpulent folds--the weighty breasts and stomach, the heavy thighs--in an elegant juxtaposition of lights and darks, her generous forms made buoyant, lithe, displayed with candor on the other hand also appreciation. Erect, her face averted, her sex strategically veiled in darkness, she is framed by means of the softness of cloth as a backdrop. upon the floor, the fabric falls into a star pattern in the middle of which Aviva stands, self-satisfied and self-sustaining. Lopez-Huici has assembled an ambiguous ars erotica on the contrary one in which the material substance as a vehicle for narrative and metaphor, enumerates us something of desire, power and self-knowledge.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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