LA PETITE MORT 2022 by Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio

LA PETITE MORT 2022 by Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio

 Fontaine-Wolf’s ‘La Petite Mort’ references Dutch still life painting, or what the Portuguese call natureza morta. The latter was such a popular genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that painters were able to specialise. There were tonal still lifes, for instance, or Pronkstilleven - elaborate still lifes - 

of which Fontaine-Wolf’s ‘La Petite Mort,’ is one. These were always contradictory. With their seductive surfaces – be it the glint of a silver platter or the drop of water on a silky petal – Dutch still lifes encouraged the viewer to indulge in material possessions at a time when the Dutch East India company was transporting ever more exotic items: pepper from Java; turkey from the Americas. Yet, they admonished the viewer too for neglecting the spiritual life, warning that pleasure – food, sex – was only temporary. Memento mori (“remember you must die'' in Latin) they proclaimed, hence the presence of hourglasses, skulls, or candles burnt to a nub. Often, death is already visible: a leaf wilts; a worm burrows into an apple. Here the classic supine nude, so beloved of classical painters and sculptors, is the banquet that is rendered as lifeless as the carcasses and the plucked fruit that surround her. There are echoes too of Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’ 1781 - a painting that has come to epitomise the Romantic movement with its emphasis on nightmares, the supernatural. In it, a virginal sleeper is unable to move, an incubus pressing on her chest and a stallion bursting through curtains. Allegedly about women’s tendency to suffer strange dreams when they are pre-menstrual, the painting has a sexual charge and the terror of sleep paralysis (which Fontaine-Wolf suffers from). 

Fontaine-Wolf’s image is a study in formal elegance: there are the subtle compositional echoes – the eye of the skinned rabbit at the lower left echoing the artist’s nipple at the edge of the mirror’s frame; the grape-green of her loin cloth. The blue pink meat, the creased white cloth add a Baroque grandeur to an eerie scene. Figure and meat create a shape like an oyster shell, a famed aphrodisiac, attribute of Venus, and symbol of female genitalia. Fontaine-Wolf also incorporates a more contemporary symbol for female erogenous zones in the peach. Hers is a work rich in symbolism where objects have multiple meanings, secular and religious. As we delve into these (the custard apple recalling Eve, The Fall; the medlar - sex work because the fruit wasn’t considered edible until it had already begun to rot) we are reminded again and again how women’s sexuality was feared. 

The post-coital mood of the work is implied also in its title, ‘La Petite Mort,’ a play on the French description for the semi-conscious state post-orgasm. Grapes recall not just the sacrificial vine but excess, wine, temptation, lust. Even the bread – the body of Christ – if left untouched imply salvation has been rejected in favour of lust. The lily, a symbol of purity, associated with the Virgin and visible at the Annunciation, is a funeral flower too: birth and death in one. And in fact, the rabbit, usually a symbol of hope and resurrection, is skinned and foetal in Fontaine-Wolf’s image, clutched close to the abdomen like a lost child. There’s a profusion of scattered feathers like a disturbed version of the still lifes with hunting motifs that graced wealthy Dutch dining rooms.The feathers hint at a violence beyond the frame. But it’s not clear if the body we see, with her blood-red fingernails, is predator or prey.

'Lost Girls' (2023) InFems at Flowers Gallery Catalogue Excerpt

‘LOST GIRLS’ : a cartography of resistance ( extract)

by Marie-Anne Mancio

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf CorpoReal depicts the naked back of the artist, the sensual curve of her shoulder narrowing to a necklace of tiny pearls – symbols of purity and Venus. She’s holding a mirror in which only part of her face is reflected: her big blue eye stares back at us. A similar mirror device in paintings of Venus by Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, and so forth was intended to simulate a three-dimensional experience of the female body, gratifying the (male) viewer’s desire to see a beautiful nude from several angles simultaneously.

Created using the same unique physi-digital mixed media technique described above, CorpoReal is an uncanny layering of shifting identities. Fontaine-Wolf’s partially reflected face appears to emerge from what could almost be a pink head-covering but is in fact a goat’s carcass. The goat has multiple associations including sin, rampant lust, carnality, and is often paired with Venus in representations. We use “old goat” to denote a lecherous man.This reference to sexuality appears confirmed by the presence of the orchids which float, suspended between body and carcass. Whilst in China the orchid is symbolic of an ideal of feminine beauty – delicate, elegant, fragrant – it also has a long association with virility. This is true of the Ancient Greek tradition; its very name derives from the Greek orchis “testicle.” (In Middle English, it was known as bollockwort.) Its roots were used as an aphrodisiac.

However, the goat in CorpoReal Self is a corpse and this a vanitas. One of a series, it was inspired by the Death and the Maiden trope familiar from Renaissance print and painting culture and beyond where a young woman is pictured with an encroaching male figure of Death. Her youth, her beauty will fade.

Yet this reading of preying man/innocent woman is destabilised by the mirror’s position. Even if we see the hand holding it, it seems to sprout from the trail of white orchid bloom, recalling depictions of Eden’s serpent to whom Michelangelo gave a woman’s form in his fresco The Fall of Adam and Eve, 1510. Another origin myth of pearls: Eve’s tears when she was banished from God’s Garden. These religious echoes are reinforced in the work’s colour palette: the pink meat for the flesh-and-blood Virgin Mary; the rich blue silk for her divine, spiritual element; the white Orchid for Faith. The goat is a sacrificial creature, of course; also the scapegoat. So who is the one suffering?

Just as the orchid is both male and female, the woman is Virgin and temptress, life and death, her many shimmering facets making her ungraspable, even to herself perhaps.

Phygital; Identity, Identifying, and Self-Portraiture in the Covid-19 Pandemic

CONNOR BENEDICT

IADE - Faculty of Design, Technology, and Communication

Universidade Europeia

Phygital; Identity, Identifying, and Self-Portraiture in the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought significant changes to many parts of our lives. For the Lisbon based artist Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf the new reality fundamentally changed and evolved her work. This latest work confronts her experience of the moment and reflects it the same way the moment defined works like the Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci and Cindy Sherman’s first photo album in the 1970’s.

Figure 1: Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Relentless Hope, 2021. Mixed media vinyl on aluminium. 200x250cm. Lisbon. © of Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf

INTRODUCTION

Krista Tippet begins each podcast episode of On Being with gratitude for the sponsors of the show. One sponsor in particular, the John Templeton Foundation, is presented as “investigating the most perplexing questions facing human kind; Who are we? Why are we here? And where are we going?” (Tippet)

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf engages with these questions pragmatically in her art. She answers them for herself and invites you to do the same.

Figure 2: Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, Luminous Dark 1, Luminous Dark 2, Luminous Dark 3, 2021. Mixed media vinyl on aluminum. 100x200cm each. Lisbon. © Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf

WHO ARE WE?

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, a British-German artist based in Lisbon, is exploring the self-portrait of the moment (Augenblick).

Her most recent work, which was shown at the MOVART Marvilla Art District Open studio October 28th, 2021, is a mixture of physical and digital manipulations of self portrait photography. The mixed media (vinyl print on aluminum with oil paint) artworks are instantly attention getting for their size and detail. As you approach the work and spend only a second looking into its deep and intricate layers you realize just as much is revealed as is obfuscated by the fractured-ness of the collage.

In her own words Rebecca describes this most recent work as embodying both “chaos and control” since there is a messy but precise expression. The work is born in this moment, the COVID-19 pandemic, and from being a figurative painter isolated in an apartment in a foreign country with primarily digital interactions. They are an evolution of previous work but also a significant departure from it.

Unable to invite friends and other people to sit for paintings or photos Rebecca became her own and only model. With some discarded broken mirrors, a home-printer, A4 paper, and plenty of time on her hands, the evolution of her work began to take shape.

Figure 3. Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas, A, B, C, 1929. Prints on pinboard. 100x125cm. Courtesy of The Warburg Institute

The exploration of the self, or the self-portrait, is ancient artistic practice. Aby Warburg’s Atlas starts the first three panels (A, B, and C) with this same exploration. Panel A are maps that provide the local context, then Panel B are maps of human proportions, anatomy, and relation to cosmology, and Panel C is the map of the universe and where we might be within that larger context.

Panel B consists of nine interpretations of the human (male) body at different times in history. The examples of proportion study are reflections of theory that anatomy, spirituality and nature are in harmony in the human shape. Whether its the zodiac or as God’s creation it is presumed that by investigating the human itself we can learn something about something greater than ourself. “Their intention was to discover the ideal in an attempt to define the normal” [Panofsky, 94]

In the center of the Panel is the Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo DaVinci. Arguably the most famous study of human proportion by an artist. At the time in the Renaissance movement DaVinci was one of dozens of contemporaries investigating human proportion in a similar manner, the out stretched limbs of a naked man decorated with geometry. This was the self-portrait of the moment. “The renaissance fused…the cosmological interpretation of the theory of proportions with the classical notion of “symmetry” as the fundamental principle of aesthetic” [Panofsky, 89]

Left, Figure 5 da Vinci, Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, C. 1490. Pen and ink with washover metalpoint on paper. 34.6cm x 25.5cm. Venice. Courtesy of Galeria d’ell Academia 

Center, Figure 4 Cesariano, Cesare, Vitruvian Man, C. 1521. Illustration, ink on paper. 42.2cm x 29.6cm. Venice. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Right, Figure 6 Andrea, Giacomo, Vitruvian Man Prototype, C. 1490. Pen and ink on paper. 17.5cm x 15cm. Ferrera. Courtesy of Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea

Warburg’s first three panels, and perhaps the entire Atlas if viewed as a whole, is also his self-portrait and reflection of his place in the world. Although he was a historian and an intellectual more than an artist it’s easy to consider the Atlas an artistic work - words to a poet. “His Atlas,… is an “attempt” or “experiment” not promising perfection and insofar as it is a highly personal, self reflexive artifact.”(Johnson, 190) A historian whose medium is picture atlas.

The first three panels are the convergence of Hellenistic, Near Eastern, and European astronomy, geography, and anatomy which are mediated my the Renaissance, by the human and the divine. (Johnson, 183) Warburg did not leave behind a guide on how to interpret the Panels or the collection so it’s up to each viewer to imbue their own meaning. One interpretation is that the Panels are a way to create an afterlife of his work and ideas, and the works represented in it in his own interpretation of their interrelation (Johnson, 179). This is where Panel B stands out compared to the other two in the beginning. It is the one that relates the human form to another order. Humans as carriers of the zodiac, as mathematical reflections or ripples through the universe, or as god’s creation.

Figure 7: Van Rijn, Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Oil on canvas. 363cm 437cm. Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Rijksmusem.

Left, Figure 8: Van Rijn, Rembrandt, Self Portrait, 1640. Oil on canvas. 102cm x 80cm. London. Courtesy of The National Gallery.

Right, Figure 9: Van Rijn, Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas. 169cm x 216cm. Amsterdam. Courtesy of Mauritshuis den Hague

The notion of exploring human form or anatomy is repeated in generations after DaVinci. Take for example paintings by Rembrandt depicting dissection. Rembrandt took the self-portrait to all levels within his paintings; placing himself in the scene, painting himself alone, and paintings of humans just as they are. The dissections in particular show the curiosity of the artist to understand the human form and being human, which is a reflection on his own experience.

“The new genre of fine art photography - which has largely replaced portrait painting - has been used for self-portraiture by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. Perhaps the most prolific creator of photographic self-portraits is Cindy Sherman (b. 1954).” (Horne)  In the panel series “Luminous Dark” we see a nude female body hidden behind a mirror that reflects parts of the body and surroundings. “I approach my work from the perspective of a painter, so the work is constructed as such, even though I’m not painting” Rebecca said to me in an interview in November 2021. Cindy Sherman describes her work similarly, she is an artist who’s medium is photography” (Kimmelmann, 148). Sherman’s work is different from what Rebecca is doing though in that Sherman describes her work as not about herself, they are portraits of facades, the masks and characters women play in society for example, not a collection of her own experiences per se (Kimmelman, 155). Rebecca on the other hand has brought her experience directly into the frame and into the finished work by saying the reality of the moment is behind a digital screen but in the physical world and the composition of the work does the same. 

Photography was turned toward the self before it was turned towards other people. Photos of places and scenery were common before photos of people (Stewart). Some of the first photos ever taken were photos of the human self, the body and again of dissection. 

Both the panel series “Luminous Dark” and the triptych “Relentless Hope” expose the inner-self of the artist and her experience of this moment and simultaneously shroud it in mystery. This dialectic experience is very relatable for anyone living this moment. We are at once reminded of our human vulnerabilities, be it physical or mental health or otherwise, and the incongruous options available to us to interact with our world.

A prominent feature of Rebecca’s current work is the piece of broken mirror which hides her face and reflects a part of the scene from an otherwise unseen perspective. It is also a invitation though for the viewer to see themselves in it and reflect about how they hide and show themselves simultaneously. During the past two years (2020-22) many people have become confronted with themselves in new ways. Being alone, being vulnerable, being separate from their “normal” lives and being scared of the new reality. This is how Rebeccas work is the self portrait of the moment, that builds on the history of portraiture and self-portraiture but places it in the contemporary.

gure 10: Sherman, Cindy, Madonna, 1975. Gelatin Silverprint. 25.4cm x 20.3cm. New York. Courtesy of HK Art Advisory and Projects.

“Sherman’s art…was confrontational…people couldn’t take for granted what they were looking at.” (Kimmelman, 148) which is to say “what is the nature of the relation between the artwork and the spectator?” (Johnson, 190) It was also “…quintessentially of the [1900’s feminist moment].” Sherman’s characters and photographs invite the same reflection. To see the artist, the artist as character, and to see yourself in the scene.

DaVinci and other’s investigation of human proportions during the renaissance was an exploration of the self. The presentation of which was an invitation to reflect and to become aware of oneself. Rembrandt showed us the human condition as if to say “this is also you.” Both of these only existed because of their context.

Figure 11: Van Gogh, Vincent, Self-Portrait, 1889. Oil on canvas. 55x85cm. Oslo. Courtesy of the National Museum for Art, Architecture, and Design.

From this point its easy to say that all art does this to an extent, it can invite the viewer to reflect about the human condition and their present experiences. But the self portraits of Van Gogh are substantially of a different influence for example. His portraits of himself over time hint at his mental illness and in general they are considered to be done to “practice portraiture” more than anything else. (Van Gogh Museum) The paintings of himself are not born from the moment even though they are about his experience and himself.

WHY ARE WE HERE?

“”Most depictions of women, pre [new wave] feminism, were exploitative, but I take that for granted. The female nude in art is something that we’ve to live with because people will always use it as a symbol of beauty. It bores me to tears. But if male artists only did male nudes, women would complain, ‘Oh they think their bodies are so great.’ One way or the other people are going to find a way to object.”” (Kimmelman, 155)

“Ask a historian “What was mankind’s greatest invention?” Fire? The wheel? The sword? I would argue it’s history itself. History isn’t fact. It’s narrative, one carefully curated and shaped. Under the pen strokes of the right scribe, a villain becomes a hero, a lie becomes the truth.” (Dawson)

What is absent from Warburg’s first three Panels? Any work definitely by a woman, which is why it is a self-portrait of his own experience in the world and his own existence, similar to Van Gogh’s paintings of himself.

Figure 12: Anguissola, Sofonisba, Self-portrait at an Easel, C.1556. Oil on canvas. 66cm x 57cm. London. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1556 Sofonisba Anguissola painted herself at an easel painting the Virgin Mary and Christ. Borzello describes woman self-portraiture as “a way to present a story about herself for public consumption.”(Borzello) At the time everything about this particular self-portrait was outlawed. Women painting, women painting themselves, women painting devotional paintings. This was all a highly punishable act. But the work survived and it tells the story of the moment and her experience at once.

Rebecca’s presence in her work is in part circumstance as mentioned, but the circumstance became a catalyst for the reflective process of the creation. Although the circumstance was different for Anguissola there was, like for Rebecca, also no one else to paint.

Just down the street, at almost the same time as Rebecca’s show, another prominent gallery showed the work of Jose Pedro Cortes and described the collection as “an ongoing dialogue…using photography as a tool to explore the surface of the moment we live in.” (Fino) In contrast to Rebecca’s work though this collection is a monotone diary entry that doesn’t relate to any experience of the moment other than his own - bored rather than confronted with himself. This is apparent because the photos in the collection could easily have been taken at any other moment in time, whereas Rebecca’s work only exists because of everything else happening right then in that moment.

Figure 13, Francisco Fino Gallery, Body Capital, Exhibition 2021. Various dimensions. Lisbon © Francisco Fino Gallery

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Rebecca says this work is not done, she has more to do in this direction with the medium and message of the work.

As the ratcheted straps seem to loosen slowly on our lives an obvious entirely new normal becomes apparent just beyond the horizon. Not only did we our individual selves change and evolve but everything else and everyone else evolved as well in their own way. The experiences of lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing, and isolation have wreaked havoc on our relations with others and with ourselves. 

Here again Rebecca’s experience of this moment becomes present in this work because it is not only a physical work, created through numerous digital processes, and physical manipulations, it is massive. The triptych “Relentless Hope” fills most any wall, measuring 200cm x 250cm, and it is meant to be experienced in real life and to confront our experiences of the recent past. “[Physical art] is an antidote to the relentless [isolation] initiated by the pandemic.” (Stewart)

Whether we continue to oscillate between modes of isolation and modes of connection remains to be seen. Rebecca though will surely continue to confront us with her experiences of that evolution.

REFERENCES

• Borzello, Frances (2016), Seeing Ourselves, Women’s Self-Portraits, London: Thames & Hudson

• Johnson, Christopher D. (2012), Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images, Ithica: Cornell University Press

• KImmelman, Michael (1998), Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere, New York: Modern Library 

• Panofsky, Erin (1983), Meaning in the Visual Arts, Garden City: Double Day Anchor Books

• Aby Warbug, Mnemosyne, Panel B, 1929. Catalog of Images, 63 Panels. Berlin. Courtesy of Warburg Institute and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

• Van Rijn, Rembrandt, Self Portrait, 1640. Oil on canvas. 102cm x 80cm. London. Courtesy of The National Gallery.

• Van Rijn, Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Oil on canvas. 363cm 437cm. Amsterdam. Courtesy of the Rijksmusem.

• Van Rijn, Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas. 169cm x 216cm. Amsterdam. Courtesy of Mauritshuis den Hague

• da Vinci, Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, C. 1490. Pen and ink with washover metalpoint on paper. 34.6cm x 25.5cm. Venice. Courtesy of Galeria d’ell Academia

• Cesariano, Cesare, Vitruvian Man, C. 1521. Illustration, ink on paper. 42.2cm x 29.6cm. Venice. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Andrea, Giacomo, Vitruvian Man Prototype, C. 1490. Pen and ink on paper. 17.5cm x 15cm. Ferrera. Courtesy of Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea

• Sherman, Cindy, Madonna, 1975. Gelatin Silverprint. 25.4cm x 20.3cm. New York. Courtesy of HK Art Advisory and Projects.

•  Van Gogh, Vincent, Self-Portrait, 1889. Oil on canvas. 55x85cm. Oslo. Courtesy of the National Museum for Art, Architecture, and Design.

• Anguissola, Sofonisba, Self-portrait at an Easel, C.1556. Oil on canvas. 66cm x 57cm. London. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

• Cortes, Jose Pedro, Body Capital, 2021. Ink on paper. Various. Lisbon. Courtesy of Francisco Fino Gallery.

• ‘The First Crisis’ (2021), Dawson, Roxan (dir), The Foundation, Season 1, Episode 9 (12, 11, USA, Phantom Four, Skydance)

• Horne, Lydia (2021), ‘Artist Reimagine how Covid-19 will Reshape the Artworld’, Wired Magazine [https://www.wired.com/story/art-future-covid-19/], Accessed November 2021

• Stewart, Jessica (2019), ’18 Famous First Photographs in History’, My Modern Met, [https://mymodernmet.com/first-photograph-photography-history/], Accessed November 2021

• Unknown (2021), ‘Van Gogh’s Self Portraits’, Van Gogh Museum, [https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/art-and-stories/stories/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-van-goghs-self-portraits], Accessed November 2021

• Unknown (2021), ‘Body Capital’, Francisco Fino Gallery, [https://www.franciscofino.com/w2/wk/body-capital_jpc/], Accessed November 2021

• Francisco Fino Gallery, Body Capital, Exhibition 2021. Various dimensions. Lisbon © Francisco Fino Gallery

InFems - Biting Back and Enjoying the Taste - Exhibition Catalogue Excerpt

With Fontaine-Wolf using her own naked body in her photographs, there is an element of self-portraiture in the work. She is literally laying herself bare, revealing and concealing, choosing what to let us see. The fact this body belongs to a young, white, beautiful, able-bodied woman might attract the same criticism levelled at Cindy Sherman’s early Untitled (Film Stills) (1977-80), namely that she is playing to the desiring “male gaze.” However, like Sherman, Fontaine-Wolf deliberately complicates her images to create something much more troubling and more rooted in the female experience of looking at herself, rather than only being looked at by others. 

Her ‘Relentless Hope’ series (2021) comprises mixed media works on aluminium which she created using a range of physi-digital processes from the more traditional media like painting, collage, printmaking and photography to digital manipulation. Even the traditional does not look familiar, though, because of her experimental approach to technique. Some marks are carefully controlled; others created through chance. The forms morph between figurative and abstract: a leg that seems to disintegrate into a brushstroke; the discernible curve of a thigh, a head that disappears amid smoke-like flourishes of paint. It is no coincidence that walking has become a key part of Fontaine-Wolf’s artistic process; an action that enables her to clear her head and process her thoughts. Our eye is in constant motion, travelling across the surfaces of her works to map the body, to make sense, for instance, of breasts that appear in the “wrong” place in The Luminous Dark III.

There is a glorious sensuousness in Fontaine-Wolf’s use of colour. In The Luminous Dark I, II, and III (each 100 x 200 cm) cool lapis blues, violets and pinks vie with greys. The figure’s skin is green in parts, alien or snake-like, recalling the snake in early depictions of the Garden of Eden, the snake of temptation that came with a woman’s face. (In her 2020 Malus works, we see a spill of juicy red fruits, including cherries and pomegranates with their associations of virginity and Persephone, of blood. Their imminent disintegration is in the best tradition of vanitas painting). Here is both a mortal body that is destined to age and decay versus what Fontaine-Wolf, with her interest in mysticism and the occult, calls the ‘possibility of an eternal spirit.’ 

We orient ourselves by the edges of a mirror that is held up, a body reflected back on itself. Art is full of mirrors. Those mirrors have multiple meanings: self-knowledge, the faculty of reasoning, Truth. The mirror appears in images of the cardinal virtue of Prudence to imply that the ability to see something from multiple angles is a mark of wisdom. Whilst the mirror is not always associated with women, (think Narcissus), it mostly is. So, it also features in personifications of the vices: Lust grips her mirror; a devil lurks in Pride’s. Accusations of Vanity are never far away. Iconic examples in painting include Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) where the convex mirror has an elaborate frame with roundels depicting scenes from The Passion that exhort the fifteenth century viewer to remember the suffering of Christ every time they peruse their own face. Or Caravaggio’s Magdalene of Mary and Martha (c.1598) whose sixteenth century mirror is a symbol of the luxuries she will relinquish to follow Christ. 

In Fontaine-Wolf’s ‘Relentless Hope’ series, the mirror is also about the challenge of digital representation. Mirrors, like photographs, were once held to be receptacles of our soul. Already Fontaine-Wolf has described ‘the contradictory forces that make up so much of our embodied human experience.’ By this she means those liminal spaces that occur between the external and internal, the boundaries between physical and psychological. In cultures where the selfie has become common currency and the photograph can be flipped, re-sized, re-coloured, where self-image is under constant scrutiny and ‘curation,’ both me and not-me, it is easy to feel fragmented. Artists have used the trope of the female body in the mirror to explore the disconnect between how we appear to others and how we appear to ourselves (Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932). Louise Bourgeois went as far as describing the mirror as her ‘enemy’ at one point, since she could not accept the self she saw in it and therefore could not accept herself. As a result of this disassociation, she banned mirrors. When she recognised the danger of that, it shifted her viewpoint. ‘You see this mirror here?’ she told an interviewer, ‘It is not [here] out of vanity—it is a deforming mirror. It doesn't reflect me, it reflects somebody else. It reflects a kind of monstrous image of myself. So I can play with that’ (cited in Bernadac, Marie-Laure and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Eds. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997 London: Violette, 1998, p.260-261.) Perhaps, as viewers, we are doomed to project our selves onto the images others make; and perhaps it is this that Velasquez realised when the mirror in his (‘Rokeby’) Toilet of Venus, 1644 returned a blurred reflection, concealing the nude’s identity or, more likely, allowing us to imagine the face of our fantasies on her supine body. Fontaine-Wolf’s own face is obscured or distorted in her images, ‘even otherworldly,’ she has said. Like a spirit, an apparition captured unexpectedly in a photograph. A sleight of hand in the way a Victorian ghost could be conjured with ectoplasm. This shifts the focus from her as individual to an archetype.

In Relentless Hope (200 x 250 cm), Fontaine-Wolf’s figure is even more fragmented, repeated, seen through a kaleidoscope of layered shards. The mirror distorts. Manet plays tricks on us with the barmaid’s reflection in Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882) which appears wrong but is, in fact, technically correct. Michelangelo Pistoletto shatters mirrors; Yayoi Kusama creates infinity rooms where mirrors double and redouble us ad infinitum. In Fontaine-Wolf’s work there is a similar sense of dislocation as limbs multiply like those of ancient Hindu deities or the many-limbed figures of Los Angeles painter Christina Quarles. Fontaine-Wolf’s use of mirrors also reflects (pun intended) her interest in French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory. Basing his thinking on empirical evidence, Lacan argued that the mirror stage is where the very young child recognises itself in a reflective surface. As the child’s experiences at this stage are often negative (marked by frustration, anxiety, distress) because it is not yet mature or autonomous, depending on others for food etc., the image it sees in the mirror is alluringly whole and ‘together;’ it is like the adults that surround it. The child reaches out to try to touch this image. Fontaine-Wolf’s hand is often visible, multiplied, seen grasping a mirror or a mirror’s frame. For Lacan we, in our adult state, are destined to chase this elusive image of harmony and mastery over ourselves forever – an attempt doomed to failure. Yet as Fontaine-Wolf’s title Relentless Hope implies, we press on, regardless, this apparently disembodied hand of the artist leading us on.

Dr Marie-Anne Mancio , 2021

HOTEL ALPHABET

Relentless Hope ( 2021)

The ‘Relentless Hope’ series consists of mixed media works on Aluminium created using physi-digital processes ranging from painting to photography, digital manipulation to collage and printmaking. The pieces explore the contradictory forces that make up so much of our embodied human experience; the liminal spaces between the external and the internal, the physical and psychological, and the ongoing struggle between the mortal body and the possibility of an eternal spirit. 

Fontaine-Wolf integrates self-portraiture to explore her own experience of the human condition, bringing a quality of intimacy to the pieces. The nature of the images created however -  faceless, distorted and almost otherworldly - allows for these images to extend outwards from the purely personal into the realm of the archetypal. 

The use of mirrors in composing the images draws on Fontaine-Wolf’s ongoing interest in Vanitas symbolism and Lacanian mirror theory, whilst also referencing her interest in mysticism and the occult. The reflections of the segmented body explore contemporary concerns with self-image and digital representation, which can lead us to feel a deep sense of fragmentation in much the same way as mirror-gazing can have a  dissociative effect on our sense of identity.

The presence of hands in this series of works act as gestures towards dissolution - multiplied and disembodied. Grasping in the dark without eyes to guide them, they continue on impelled by a sense of relentless hope. 

Aesthetica Magazine Interview | ING Discerning Eye: Expanding Perception | 2019

The ING Discerning Eye Exhibition returns to Mall Galleries, London, this month. The exhibition champions emerging and established artists, presenting a dynamic selection of small works for sale. Each piece is selected independently by leaders in the creative arts  – resulting in six diverse exhibitions within the whole. Aesthetica speaks to artist Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, whose work is included in this year’s show.

A: How does it feel to be part of the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition 2019?
RFW: I’m honoured to have been invited by Sir Tim Rice and to be exhibiting alongside some of his other selected artists, such as Jonathan Yeo, Lisa Wright, Paul Benney, Kristian Evju and Nell Sully whom I greatly admire. The ING Discerning Eye Exhibition is always an exciting show; the format of having six selectors curating their own areas of the gallery makes for an engaging and fun viewing experience. It’s also always exciting to be showing some new works for the first time and seeing how they are received. Especially the three pieces from my Lover’s Eye series, which are quite different for me, in part because it’s the first time I’ve worked on this very small scale.

A: What are the main themes in your work, and why did you choose painting as a medium?
RFW: My work revolves around female identity and the experience of being a woman. I’m interested in the very personal and often unspoken physical realities connected with the female body, including the changes and cycles we go through and connected societal pressures. Themes around mortality and desire, which are deeply bound up with the symbolism of the female through mythology and religion, also feature quite heavily.

I’m drawn to painterly draughtsmanship. To me there’s something almost magical about creating a lifelike image just out of pigment on a surface; but I’m equally interested in the materiality of the medium itself.  You can create so many different textures and effects with paint alone, and there is always an element of chance that comes with painting. As much as I plan something out in advance, I can never fully anticipate what the paint will do, and where it will lead me. This gives the whole process of creating an element of being alive, which mirrors the subject matter I’m working with. There’s a cyclical tension between control and chaos in the act of painting. Images and brushstrokes are brought into existence only to be destroyed, becoming absorbed into the next form or layer and turned into something new yet again. Although I predominantly paint, I also really enjoy working with digital mediums. In the end I need to feel physically connected to the work, so that it’s almost something that has come from my own body.

A: Your pieces explore ideas of the female gaze. Why is it important to address this in 2019?
RFW: Over the last few years the art world seems to have accepted that female artists are underrepresented. Thankfully many galleries and museums are trying to redress this balance. The female gaze is important because it shows the world from a different perspective. Seeing the world represented through the eyes of women – and the ‘other’ in general – will begin to rebalance the cultural landscape around us which shapes so many of our attitudes and societal norms. I don’t believe that there is any one kind of definition of what the contemporary female gaze is, as there are so many ways of experiencing womanhood.

A: How does your work combine historical influences – including mythology and Vanitas painting – with experiences of today’s world?RFW: The main way I combine these influences is by exploring how they still affect us today. All myths and folklore become part of our cultural make up, and the Greek Myths have such a lasting legacy. Many of the ideas and archetypes described in them still inform our opinions without us necessarily being aware of it.

My last solo show, for example, was inspired by the myth of the Medusa and her connection with menstruation and the female gaze. It explored how this story represents woman as a dual image: beautiful and pure on the one hand and “monstrous” on the other. This image – along with the taboos around women’s bodily functions – stem from these stories.

A: You often work with subjects whom you know. What does this sense of connection add to the artwork?
RFW: It plays a vital part for me. Even though I have specific themes for each body of work, I still want to create images of women that are based in reality. I want to incorporate some of my sitter’s personal essence and experiences through the prism of the ideas I’m exploring. It’s through doing this that I believe you can create representations of women which other women can truly connect with. My main aim is always to create images that are both personal and universal at once.

I want to use my gaze to celebrate my sitters, and to reflect back to them what I see; allowing them to view themselves through another woman’s eyes. In return, the responses I get back from them about the paintings often reveal facets I had been unaware of myself. In this way the painting becomes a process of making visible otherwise invisible aspects of ourselves, to ourselves through each other.

A: Can you tell us about the works you will be showing in the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition?
RFW: The pieces from the Lover’s Eye series are inspired by 18th and 19th Century miniature ‘lover’s eye’ jewellery – as well as my ongoing interest in the symbolism of the female gaze and its perceived dangers. I was really drawn to the idea of being able to capture and cherish your lover’s forbidden gaze, and making it even more precious by turning it into an actual jewel. The eye was used as a symbol for the vulva, menstruation and fertility in ancient times, so there is a very strong link between the forbidden nature of the female gaze and women’s sexuality. I’ve played with this in these pieces. Alongside these I’ll be showing some paintings which continue to explore the physical experience and sensations of the body.

A: Why do you think initiatives such as ING Discerning Eye are important for contemporary artists?
RFW: Having open exhibitions like this is a vital opportunity for contemporary artists, especially ones who aren’t as established to break through into the often-elusive art world. It’s an opportunity to have your work seen by prominent figures in the arts, to exhibit alongside seasoned artists and possibly have your work become part of the ING collection.  Apart from this it’s also a great opportunity to have the work seen by the large number of visitors that come to see the exhibition every year.

The ING Discerning Eye Exhibition runs 14 – 24 November at Mall Galleries, London, and all artworks are for sale. Find out more here.

Model Musings | 2019

I was half-joking when I volunteered my middle-aged nakedness to be painted by Rebecca. When she accepted my offer with enthusiasm I was initially delighted and subsequently terrified. The kind of terror one might expect to feel if having volunteered to jump out of an aeroplane or walk hot coals for a dare. As an artist myself, I joke that it’s my superpower to get people naked within a few minutes of meeting them in order to do my work. It seemed only fair and fitting that I too should experience the sense of vulnerability and exposure my clients feel when they walk into my own studio.

In arranging the date with Rebecca, my anxiety increased dramatically. I compared myself to the beautiful women in her previous works of art and felt ridiculous and unworthy by comparison. I cruelly poked and pulled at my own belly fat in the days leading up to my modelling date, as if this one part of my body was some how to blame for my unacceptability. I’m 46, I droop and wobble, I dimple and I fold. What art could possibly come of me? And yet, when the day came, I showered and found some daring-do inside of me, determined to do my best for Rebecca, whatever that might mean. I had no idea what she envisioned, and still terrified of disappointing her, we began trying different poses. When you disrobe for a lover, there is an anxiety you might disappoint them with physical unsexiness, or simply be crap in bed. When disrobing for Rebecca I was simply scared that nothing I had to offer would inspire her to paint. That she would have wasted a day coming to see me naked, and we’d both be embarrassed by my inadequacy as a model and a woman.

Talking through her ideas for her new collection gave me a different perspective. Rebecca was looking for something more real, raw and feminine than images of naked flesh we are usually bombarded with. We talked about different stages of feminine physicality - menstruation, pregnancy, and my own personal fun time with peri menopause. We talked about feminine archetypes in mythology and what they mean to us. And I found myself reflecting on so many of the roles I have played or been assigned in life:- virgin, innocent, victim, seductress, mother, provider, monster, crone (yes…even at 46). Curling my naked body around my own work (life cast sculptures of women at every stage of life), with muslin draped around and over my face like a veil I felt strangely liberated. I wasn’t me, raw and naked on my studio floor any more. I was a woman, any and all of them, and some kind of creature too - contorting and flexing to express something more than just shapes for the viewer. I was no longer scared. I felt amused and powerful like a queen.

Rebecca’s reaction to the poses came as a complete surprise. Her growing excitement for the work she would create from the photos she was taking of me made me feel so alive and fabulous. My nakedness had nothing to do with the commercially acceptable sexual beauty that women my age feel like we constantly fail at, and everything to do with the core of my femininity - my wisdom, power, experience, my secrets and my skills, the life I have created, the love I have shared and inspired, the magic. The resulting paintings are astounding. From the collection, I instantly recognised myself and yet they seem so strange and other-worldly.

These are not portraits, but abstractions of my curves, my bones, my wild and strong spirit set free. I see not only myself but the women that surround me in life. I recognise my sister’s wrists in mine, my grandmother’s calves and ankles, my mother’s hips. I’m alone in the painting and yet I’m not - there is a unity, an affinity with my gender, with my tribe. The streak of red across one of the paintings feels like a powerful flag that I am claiming for my own. I’m still 46, and I still droop, wobble, dimple and fold. But I’m fucking fabulous.

CJ Munn 2019