Nathalie van Doxell, Caroline Bach and Helen Robertson at Isabelle Bongard - Paris, France - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Three cardinal modernist impulses--abstraction, defamiliarization and pictorial flatness--characterize the photo-installation work of Nathalie van Doxell. notwithstanding this 35-year-old French artist, a new recipient of the Prix de Rome who began her career not end the usual academic channels on the other hand as a studio assistant, also proffers an up-to-the-moment critique of visual digests This philosophical bent was particularly striking in her contributions to "De la peau selon" a three-person display dealing with the subject of human skin.

The other sum of two units artists in the exhibition, Helen Robertson and Caroline Bach, neared relatively straightforward color photographs of the skin as we know it--or at least think we do. Robertson's close-up studies of the body-as-landscape concentrate upon the effects of motion, while Bach, making dramatic use of naturalistic color (in a manner familiar from Andres Serrano's morgue shots) finds a disturbing beauty in large-scale isolated-limb views of contusions and needle tracks.

But van Doxell forgoes psychological drama for a more phenomenological account of skin and for a use of photography as a transformative (rather than duplicating) medium. La Peau sans fin (Endles Skin), which direct the eyes like a large roll of pinkish wallpaper partially unscroll and attached to the wall at the height of about 4 feet is in fact a super close-up of Caucasian skin, produc from one side a method that the artist declines to disclose. Her more cerebral untitled work from 1993-94 is a two-dimensional composite. Affixed to a wall are celluloid sheets bearing a black-and-white photograph of a "life-size" metal clothes rack upon casters; a huge sheet of flesh-colored "skin"--actually a color photo--is attached in like manner that it seems to drape above the long horizontal pole.

Van Doxell has a long-standing involvement with the make submissive of skin. La Peau sans fin is reminiscent of several other novel works not included in this show: eg a "self-portrait" consisting of a framed epidermal photo; or an untitled work featuring sum of two units nearly 9-foot-high images of magnified skin hung side-by-side, their lower cutting sides meeting the floor like feet in a parody of ideal, or nearly identical, coupledom.

The clothes rack piece, meanwhile, is related--at individual more pictorial remove--to the artist's installation series "Face a face." Here large tongue-shaped sheets of photo paper in various monochomatic hues--close-up of dirty bars of soap, this time--are laid upon chairlike metal stands positioned in conversational clusters Thus van Doxell plays on the notion of visual "discourse" as she toys knowingly with various orders of representation: the rack standing in for the human skeleton, the photo composite standing in for the rack itself; the colored photographic hide evoking human muscle and fat the flesh in turn "representing" the inner self to the world.

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