Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… by Christophe Koné pHd

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

Fragmented female body parts and broken mirror pieces, arranged in a disorienting tangle—such eerie tableaux vivants have become the signature of German-British artist Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf. Influenced by the body sculptures of German-American Hans Breder (1927-2017), Fontaine-Wolf uses this indirect and disjointed form of self-portraiture to probe the possibilities and questions the strategies of visual representation from a feminist perspective.

Painters since the Renaissance have used the mirror as a prop to explore linear perspective and expand the realm of vision. In Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), the double portrait of an Italian merchant and his wife, the Dutch painter depicts on the back wall a convex mirror whose reflection expands the picture space and to allow in two extra figures standing in the hallway. In Diego Velázquez’ Las Meninas (1599-1600), a portrait of the court of King Philip IV of Spain, the painter presents the five-year old infanta Margaret Teresa surrounded by her entourage, and in the background a mirror reflecting the upper bodies of the Spanish King and his spouse. The reflection shows the couple in the pose they are holding for Velázquez – also self-portrayed at the easel - , while their daughter is watching them.

As for the association between the mirror and the naked female body,  artists since the Baroque have (over)used this trope to showcase the female nude while introducing an ambivalent, desiring male gaze into the frame. Mythological depictions of Venus with a mirror praise female beauty while Baroque vanitas paintings denounce its vanity and ephemerality. In Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647-1651), we see the goddess reclining in the nude on a bed with her back turned on the viewer, gazing at her reflection in a mirror held by Cupid. 

Later in the twentieth century,  female performance artists were using the mirror as a prop to denounce the male gaze and reclaim female agency. In American artist Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece I and II, performers carried mirrors in choreographed sequences before an audience. The reflections both fractured and included their surroundings. In Mirror Check, Jonas herself examined every part of her naked body with a small mirror in front of an audience. By shielding viewers from her own mirror reflection, she preserved her self-perception, and thus subverted the notion of the female nude an object for the public gaze.

Rebecca Fontaine Wolf reclaims both the feminist agenda of female performance artists from the 1970’s and the aesthetic heritage of the Renaissance and the Baroque. By creating a fruitful dialogue between photography and painting, she engages with the tradition from a contemporary feminist perspective.

Let’s take a look at her series Malus, realized in 2020, which features fragments of a headless female body placed outdoors and positioned against a blue wall. The paint peeling from the wall lays bare a cement and brick composition. The body partially hides its nudity behind a mirror piece placed next to a red patch of peeling paint. At times, white painted fingernails, fingers, hands, and even forearms emerge from behind the mirror piece, which seems to be a shard missing from the wall. The female figure employs the mirror as a shield, covering parts of her naked body, hiding her identity, and protecting her anonymity from the viewer’s inquisitive gaze. The figure represented here does not offer the mirror to the viewer to consider her own reflection, as in Gustav Klimt’s 1889 painting Nuda Veritas. On the contrary, the reflecting power is directed only upon the woman inside the image . By both fragmenting her body and duplicating its parts, the mirror offers various viewpoints and perspectives on a single pair of legs, in a manner reminiscent of a Cubist painting. The figure on the floor thus takes various anthropomorphic shapes, in some ways resembling the bodies of conjoined twins. 

Placed in front of or between the figure’s legs, a rectangular mirror piece is covered with red fruits--apples, pomegranates, cherries, prunes. Some are sliced open, others have been crushed, smearing the tiled floor with stains. The fruit assortment recalls Baroque still lifes from the Dutch Golden Age, but instead of the meats, fish or mollusks in those paintings, we see the anthropomorphic figure, offering its flesh as a delicacy to accompany the fruit. The title, Malus, refers to the generic name of the apple tree, but it is also the Latin word meaning “bad, evil” and thus in one short word it ties the naked body and the fruit together in a pithy association with the biblical story of Eve and the forbidden fruit. The apples, pomegranates, cherries, and prunes splayed between the legs can become the fruits of her womb—birth, miscarriage, or menstruation. A kitchen knife, with its handle positioned towards the figure, seems to have been used to slice the prunes and pomegranates open, and its form here echoes the sharp edges and corners of the mirror piece that cuts the woman in half and pierces her skin. Like knives, mirrors cut deep and inflict real wounds. Did this figure harm herself, opening a bright wound of red fruits? Or is the knife a reminder of the lethal power of the gaze, from which the figure has managed so far to hide?

The 2020 series Caput Mortuum is in many regards similar to Malus. A headless naked figure crouches in some kind of wasteland, perhaps an abandoned construction site, holding a mirror with broken edges.  This time though, the relationship between figure and mirror is different: the crouching female seems to be using the mirror to display her naked body, to turn its image outward toward the viewer. Here the vivid pink and purple colors of the setting have been corrected and graded. The purple and magenta of dirt, weeds, and rocks make a jarring  contrast with the flesh tones of the female figure. These radiant colors, known as “cardinal purple,” illustrate the title of the series Caput mortuum since it is the name given to a purple variety of hematite iron oxide pigment, used in oil paints. The color Caput mortuum is best used to create shadows in landscapes and convey texture in botanicals. That is why the color shows up in Fontaine-Wolf’s image precisely to illustrate shadows and give texture to plants.  

Originally, “Caput Mortuum”—meaning “dead head” in Latin—was an alchemical term describing a useless substance left over from a chemical operation. The crouching figure is surrounded by such detritus, surrounded indeed by hematite minerals, the bright magenta and dark purple-colored rocks used by painters to produce these pigments.  

At first glance, Caput Mortuum II looks like the surreal scene of a gruesome crime, with body parts lying scattered in a wasteland: an extended arm with a hand still gripping on the edge of a mirror, two tangled pairs of legs.  The shapes of the legs form a hexagon, and the eye gradually discovers a mirror piece among them, held by the female figure, so that some portions of the legs are original, and some are reflection. The function of the mirror piece is once again ambivalent: it duplicates and fragments the body, while its square angles and sharp broken edges cut like a knife. By positioning two mirror pieces, one vertically and the other in diagonal, the anthropomorphic female figure frames the viewer’s field of vision and literally captures their gaze. By obliterating the view of the landscape in the background with the mirror reflection, she forcefully redirects the viewer’s gaze towards her legs spread wide open. The image invites a jarring oscillation between the erotic and the macabre.

Fontaine-Wolf’s recent series Entwined (2023) bears her trademark elements, but this time the artist  has added a male figure. The photographs of Entwined feature two pairs of legs with distinct skin complexions – two smooth legs with pale rosy skin tones read female, while the hairy legs with darker skin tones read male – entangled and combined with mirror pieces. This androgynous four-legged figure is positioned atop a piece of wooden furniture, covered with a white draped cloth. Lying on the wooden floor next to the cloth, a pomegranate can be spotted in this large, once elegant room, where the wallpaper is now torn and the brick wall pocked with holes. The pastel pink double door and the pastel green window shades, which let a bright sunlight in, confer the outdated aesthetic of turn-of-the century erotica. The fleshy thigh of the female figure against a white draped cloth recalls the curves of the female nudes of French Rococo painter François Boucher, such as Blond Odalisque (1752), which were designed as eye candy for an exclusively male audience. Here too, the viewer has intruded upon into an intimate bed scene, tangled limbs and bedclothes—a voyeur. And yet the next impression is not titillation or arousal,  but discomfort: the limbs do not lead to bodies. Indeed the legs look almost clumsy in their effort reach each other. The image could be read as an illustration of Lacan’s suggestion that there is no inherent relation between the sexes, in which he explains that there is no symmetry or reciprocity between male and female sexual positions. These two pairs of legs, duplicated in the mirror pieces both figures hold, seem to multiply many times, almost suggesting spiders or centipedes. Although the sculpture The Kiss by Auguste Rodin (1882) was a source of inspiration for Fontaine-Wolf’s series – the position of the couple’s legs imitate the marble statue – that echo is instantly distorted. The mirror reflection does duplicate, truncate, and lacerate body parts. But it also distorts them to the point of anamorphosis, leaving the viewer confounded. Perhaps the most unsettling facet of Fontaine-Wolf’s eerie tableaux vivants is not the mirror reflections of the artist’s own body, but the viewer’s reflections on her own. 

Christophe Koné is Associate Professor of German  and the Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA. He holds a Masters in German Studies from Université Lumière, Lyon 2, France, and a PhD in German Studies from Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. He is the author of Uncanny Creatures: Doll Thinking in Modern German Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2024).

Fragmented Desire 2024 by Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio

Fragmented Desire

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s series Fragmented Desire is an extended self-portrait, both interior and exterior. Its smallest work, I am the living bread depicts what could be an organism’s cell or brain, but is, in fact, Fontaine-Wolf’s mammogram. The title quotes John 6:51, hence the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby, at consecration, the Eucharistic bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ. But it also relates to the maternal function of the breast as nourishment. The salvific value of motherhood conveyed on the Virgin Mary and faith in her virginity (widespread by the C4th CE) saw the proliferation of Marian imagery, including the popular iconography of the Madonna lactans, the breastfeeding Madonna. By linking these concepts, I am the living bread celebrates woman as life-giving force – the image glows beatifically when light hits the aluminium panel – whilst acknowledging the shift, post-pregnancy, in a woman’s relationship with her own breast, hitherto associated with sexual pleasure. 

The mammogram’s presentation in isolation from the rest of the body also recalls the attributes of tortured St. Agatha, her excised breasts on a platter which, in turn, might find a contemporary echo in our fear of mastectomy. However, there is also a disturbing, erotic sadomasochism in depictions of saints’s torture. In Giovanni Lanfranco’s painting, St. Peter Healing Agatha (1614), the bleeding gash on the saint’s breast is simultaneously Christ’s side wound and a vulva. This conflation was already evident in the luxurious Prayer Book of Bonne Luxembourg (pre-1349), where the wound was inspired by medieval imagery of the vulva/ vaginal opening and presented amid objects of Christ’s persecution and death, such as the whip, hammer, pliers, nails, and so on. Fontaine-Wolf alludes to it in her own Instruments of Passion. Blue, colour of the divine and of erotic movies, dominates. There’s a cool sensuality at play in the glimpses of bluish nipples and the blue silky fabric in vulvic folds that also points to perceptions of female sexuality as a weapon, capable of inflicting both pain and pleasure.

The pietà (“pity” or “compassion”), was a subject developed in early C14th northern Europe to convey the emotional pain of the Virgin for her dead son. By the Renaissance, Bellini, Perugino, and Michelangelo had created powerful variations of affective piety, laying Christ’s body across his mother’s lap, invoking his birth and death simultaneously. Fontaine-Wolf’s interpretation emphasises this through the inclusion of an ultrasound of her womb. However, in reversing the genders, her Pietà draws attention to the ‘feminine’ aspects of Christ: his vulnerability, softness, meekness, self-sacrifice, suffering, and so forth, qualities historically associated with women. The textures and complex, reflective surfaces of Fontaine-Wolf’s series evoke the high Baroque. Her bodies are sited in an ornate church setting of marble floors and gold candlesticks, yet flesh is stone-pale. These could be sculptures, timeless archetypes. Even her ultrasound looks like marble. The tripartite structure implies an altarpiece, except the wings are not of equal size or of the same format. Again, the bodies are not visible as complete entities, but are overlapping, interrupted, split, by vertical or horizontal velvet strips. Juxtaposed in places by a fleshier pink, these velvet ruptures mimic wounds, or, again, the vulva.

The contrast between the cold, clinical aluminium versus the soft velvet in Fontaine-Wolf’s Pietà, as well as between her sculptural bodies and the non-figurative passages of free-form swirls, speaks to patriarchal archetypes of woman as vessel in both religious and medical discourse versus the lived experiences of women. Rather than presenting religion and medicine as separate belief systems, Fontaine-Wolf underlines their collusion. A fresco from the Cycle of Saint Francis in the Upper Church of the Basilica of Assisi, 1288–1297, for instance, depicts the physician Girolamo verifying St. Francis’s stigmata, thus instructing the believer that there was objective scientific ‘proof’ of the saint’s wounds. Classified and controlled by patriarchal structures, Fontaine-Wolf’s women respond by dissolving into illegible marks that refuse to be contained. 

Dolorosa invokes another pictorial representation of the suffering Mary: the mater dolorosa (“Mother of Sorrows”). Traditionally depicted with seven arrows through her heart to symbolise each stab of emotional pain beginning with Simeon’s Prophecy and culminating in the burial of her son, Mary enables the believer to link womb and tomb in a linear narrative. In Fontaine-Wolf’s version, the imagery is much more ambiguous, though the colour blue functions to suggest sorrowful and divine. Tripartite in structure and edged in aluminium, Dolorosa, when read from left to right, becomes increasingly abstract. First, we see Fontaine-Wolf’s textured profile, only legible through the presence of eyelashes in what doubles as the curve of a mirror and/or halo. The central image derives from an X-ray of the artist’s skull, a familiar memento mori motif from earlier series, as well as a reminder that hormonal changes can cause the potential loss of teeth in pregnancy. Meanwhile, at right, there appears to be the continuation of a blue velvet curtain – a nod to David Lynch’s iconic film Blue Velvet (1986) which Michael Atkinson interprets through Freud’s theory of psychic impotence (that is, the condition of the heterosexual male with unresolved sensual and forbidden feelings for his mother that manifest in an inability to desire the woman he loves and to love the woman he desires. This leads to a compartmentalising of women into either the ‘mother’ to be loved, or the ‘whore’ to be debased). Fontaine-Wolf seems to suggest then, that the ideal of the Madonna always exists in a dichotomous relationship with the whore.

Her Pandora’s Box is a case in point. It could be a portable altarolo, a precious object used for private devotion, however, its wings don’t conceal the whole of the central panel which seems to show an abstracted nude. The outer wings, faced with dusty pink velvet, imply something demure. Except, like a striptease, they open to reveal more of that central image: at left, a clearer, headless, crouching woman, and a greenish, fossilised serpent shape. Beside it, a meat carcass. The visible ribs of the meat, combined with serpent and woman, inevitably summon the figure of Eve. Eve as we perceive her now – the seductress responsible for the Fall, punished with the pain of childbirth – dates to a C4th CE re-interpretation of Genesis by St. Augustine and others, if not earlier C2nd BCE Jewish literature. Pandora (“a gift to all,” “all gifted”) is her closest pagan predecessor. According to the myth recounted by Greek poet, Hesiod circa 700 BCE, when Prometheus offends the King of the Gods, Zeus avenges himself by ordering the creation of Pandora, a “beautiful evil,” the first woman in Prometheus’s idyllic world. He also gives her a jar (which becomes reimagined as a box by the Renaissance) that must not be opened. When Pandora succumbs to her curiosity and opens the sealed vessel – another reference to the womb, but also to the vulva (‘box’ in Tudor English slang) – she unwittingly releases vice, sorrow, and disease into the world. As in so many religious and mythological stories, then, it is the mortal woman’s desire for carnal knowledge or procreation that leads to the downfall of humankind and, consequently, to death. In fact, a section of Fontaine-Wolf’s skull x-ray is reflected in the part-mirrored section at the inner right of Pandora’s Box. 

This trope of the unruly, ‘fallen’ woman is also implied in Fontaine-Wolf’s What Lies Beneath I which shares a title with a supernatural horror film (2000, director: Robert Zemeckis) about duality and possession. In it, the ‘hysterical’ female protagonist is inhabited by the ghost of her husband’s murdered mistress, whose face appears reflected in place of her own in the bathwater. Both water and mirror imagery recur in the film. Equally, in Fontaine-Wolf’s unique physi-digital process, there is always a complex layering; often, images are doubled, reflected, or reversed. (Pieces of Her is a wittily self-referential, more explicit section of the Pietà). Mirrors feature in many previous works. In What Lies Beneath I, the tripartite structure acts like a dressing table tri-fold mirror, a theatrical, film noir device to express duality or a split persona. Fontaine-Wolf’s head and bare pink shoulders are seen from behind, part of the head obscured by a fold in a blue velvet curtain. She contemplates herself in the mirror: the reflection, split across the central and far right panel, is silhouetted, faceless. Perhaps it isn’t even a reflection but another back view, as in Magritte’s Not To Be Reproduced (1937). Or, again, an ominous film noir shadow. At left, her flesh is blue-toned, her half-head almost reduced to thick, blue brushstrokes; she wears a pearl necklace, bearer of multiple meanings: a symbol of Venus in Antiquity, of extravagance for Pliny, of the Immaculate Conception (that is, the birth of the Virgin Mary) and Christ’s birth for Christians. The woman remains fragmentary, unknowable, elusive. Even more so in the companion piece, What Lies Beneath II where only her interior is portrayed. Both innocent and femme fatale. 

Indeed, Fontaine-Wolf’s body is fragmented and dispersed throughout the series, only partially reassembled through the juxtaposition of works in curation: faceless head and torso in Echoes of a Woman, legs in Fragmented Desire, for instance. The diptych format of Echoes of a Woman emphasises the motif of duality. At left, the backward thrust of a woman’s head references Man Ray’s photograph Anatomies, 1929 of his artist lover Lee Miller’s throat, which, isolated in this way, appears phallic. Fontaine-Wolf’s pose also refers to Bernini’s infamous sculptural group, the Ecstasy of St Teresa (1647-52) which depicts the saint at the moment golden arrows pierce her entrails. Though St. Teresa’s account describes this as a spiritual experience (albeit with sadomasochistic undertones), Bernini gives his sculpture an orgasmic facial expression. (As Charles de Brosses, President of Dijon, remarked in the late C18th, “If that is divine love, I too have known it.”) In both these cases, female sexuality is viewed through the same lens of heterosexual male desire; the man literally seeing himself within her as phallus (Man Ray) and imagining her open mouth (Bernini).

At right, the reverse image has literally been defaced, the face and most of the hand erased by a thick snake of blue paint. It recalls, perhaps, Man Ray’s Lee Miller (c. 1930), another image of Miller’s throat, this time seen in profile, which he discarded, but she then printed and claimed authorship of. Furious, Ray retaliated by razor-slashing it and splattering it with blood-red ink. This uncomfortable entwining of sexual desire and violence, of Ray’s attempt to slaughter his muse at the point at which she declared herself artist and owner of her image, all find echo in the undercurrent of foreboding in Fontaine-Wolf’s series. And in the biography of Bernini who ordered the slashing of his inconstant lover and model Costanza’s actual face. Instead of being castigated by Pope Urban VIII, the sculptor was ordered to marry. His wife bore him 11 children. 

Fragmented Desire is a free-standing sculpture which takes the form of a two-panel folding screen. Such screens were popular in bedrooms in the C18th and C19th, acting as sexual metaphors in painting, encouraging the viewer to imagine women undressing. The screen has also been viewed as a vulvar object, as evidenced in its use by designer and architect Eileen Gray, for example.  Its format – the act of opening to reveal, closing to conceal – also mimics that of the altarpiece where outer panels were typically less magnificent than the interiors. Here, the outer panels are covered in blue velvet – again, doubling as both a reference to a psychosexual Lynchian world and to the spiritual. When approaching the open screen from one angle, the viewer sees herself reflected in a mirrored inner panel – the sole whole image of a body in the series. Yet this totality also breaks down, because seen from a different angle, the mirror reflects the imagery on the other inner panel which is of already-mirrored bare thighs emerging from a cocoon of white silk. The resulting image has the appearance of a surreal, many-legged creature. The action of opening and closing a bi-fold screen, like a parting of all these legs, is itself suggestive. As well as signifying sex, a woman’s open legs might also recall the position for giving birth. Here, she could be giving birth to herself. 

The inclusion of fabric within the image in Fragmented Desire is reminiscent of a tradition in Japanese C17th folding screens tagasode byōbu (“whose sleeves?”) in which opulent, discarded clothes were depicted draped over bamboo clothing racks mimicking the real-life custom of displaying silk clothes on lacquered stands as signifiers of wealth. There’s actual cloth in Fontaine-Wolf’s The Serpent’s Mantle: two lengths of black velvet, co-joined in the middle by a rectangular metal section complete with womb ultrasound and mammogram images, hanging over suspended aluminium poles, like Eden’s infamous snake in the tree. At once suggesting the snake’s shed skin (a symbol of renewal) and a priest’s cassock, the mantle is bookended by two metal triangles – a shape recalling the Trinity, the vulva – one showing an eye, the other a mouth. The eye references the observer (Adam and Eve’s are opened through their interaction with the snake; Man Ray excised the photograph of Lee Miller’s for his sculpture Object to Be Destroyed, 1932); the mouth – that which bites the forbidden fruit, that which screams in pain or ecstasy - doubles as orifice and wound. Ultimately this phallic serpent mantle, with all its allusions to interiors and exteriors, to revealing and concealing, to pure and impure, to medicine and religion, functions as a portrait of the slippery nature of desire itself. 

Dr. Marie-Anne Mancio, art historian, lecturer, and writer, 2024

Dressing a sublime carcass and other of Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s oxymorons by Manuel Furtado

Dressing a sublime carcass 

and other of Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s oxymorons 

It is only time taken in shedding clothes which makes voyeurs of the public: but here, as in any mystifying spectacle, the décor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance: evil is advertised the better to impede and exorcize it. 

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Striptease 

The word “dress” originally means prepare (dresser). This is why it still can be applied to a dead animal, referring to the procedures required for its consumption, as well as to putting on clothes. It means removing parts of a dead animal and adding layers to a living person, which is quite interesting if we think of the iconic primitive clothes made with animal hair. 

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s work is deeply rooted in the following elements, many of which were mentioned above: death, carcasses, preparation, dressing the nude body, the performative, the gaze wrapped up in erotic desire, the integration of different types of “cultural makeup”1, paint as a diagrammatic picturesque action defacing subjects and, also, the digital (photo, collage and print) simulating to perfection the serendipity of painting… If this seems somehow promiscuous and confusing rest assured each of these issues will be further investigated, articulated and explained in this text… however this is just a glimpse of a much larger myriad of subtle (re)combinations2 of opposites implied in this artist’s dialectic oxymorons. 

The contradiction identified by Barthes in “Striptease”: “Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked” is alluded to in this body of work but it never actually applies since the body remains eternally dressed with mirrors and reflections of itself. The same negation of Barthes’ thought happens regarding his description of the “French striptease” quoted above since there is no time in Fontaine-Wolf’s work as far as the observer is concerned. As Lessing famously declares time is absent from painting (in a broad sense) since there is a fundamental difference between the instantaneous nature of a portrait and the narrative dimension of poetry (time based). Even if this thought goes against more than two thousand years of history of merging poetry and fine art it is extremely helpful for us to understand the 

1 This expression was used previously by Fontaine-Wolf regarding myths, archetypes and their contemporary nature. If we take myths as being cultural makeup interesting questions arise. If makeup hides imperfections and enhances strong features… does that mean myths are inspiring exaggerations? Could these hyperboles help question the hidden forces manipulating our beliefs and behaviours? Do they make the underlying forces visible instead? Do they express some prevailing sensation turning the anecdotal and the individual experience into universal systemic structures?

2 Recombination as in genetics. 

disruptive difference between the description of “Striptease” above and Fontaine-Wolf’s art. We can easily understand now why the observers are not voyeurs, why the performative is not striptease, why stereotypes are replaced by archetypes and finally why in the end it is significance which prevails. In a way what is proposed is an inverted striptease, dressing instead of undressing. Still erotic, still an exorcism but making use of only one instant, only a contradictory combination of body parts dressing our imagination with new perspectives of themselves which are almost as unrevealing as those photographed directly. 

“At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it’s all about.” 

Dumas, Marlene3 

The question of the limits of desire and how art can use, participate or be based on eroticism or pornography is extremely complex. This contemporary aporia4is probably a semantic issue as Wittgenstein would put it5. How each person uses these words (erotic or pornographic) varies from person to person and that’s why defining them is practically impossible. However, for the purpose of this text it is enough to notice how our gaze is wrapped up in erotic desire and how that implies the postponing of what is being suggested. 

In some of the more recent photographs there is a male presence. This is a relevant development bringing the defaced other to the merging of fragmented bodies. This may indicate the non-toxic, empathic, helpful male is coming through Fontaine-Wolf’s art. A Merlin or a Mordred in the Mists of Avalon? Anyhow an exceptional male feminist empowering the “dangerous woman’s gaze”6 or maybe even the “Goddess”. 

Based on the information available and a long interview with Rebecca Fountaine-Wolf in her Lisbon studio7 a bold statement claims to be made: until now no one has considered (in writing) the deep implications of Deleuze’s thought on the recurring tensions and themes present in her work. Fontaine-Wolf is a Deleuzean artist since she integrates his thoughts as premisses and expands on them using visual means. However, many may be completely unaware of how much that adjective 

3 Pornographic Tendency, 1986. Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, 2014, p. 33.

4Irresolvable set of conflicting views on the same issue which actually make perfect sense on their own. 5" The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. ", 5.62 in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922. “Now what do the words of this language signify? What is supposed to shew what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?” or “Meaning it is not a process which accompanies a word. For no process could have the consequences of meaning.” Both in Philosophical Investigations, 1953. 6 Rebecca mentions the “dangerous woman’s gaze” in some of her previous interviews referring to how the woman’s gaze has been perceived historically by the patriarchal system. 

7 One of the first references mentioned by the Rebacca was the previous quote by Marlene Dumas. 

applies to her artistic endeavours and how his production of concepts may unfold dimensions of her work neglected until now. 

Conveniently artists do not speak of the unconscious but let the unconscious speak instead… In a similar fashion they frequently avoid speaking about aesthetics but allow their artistic practice to reflect the unconscious or intuitive knowledge of those issues revealing an awareness they are often unaware of. Let us consider two major works by Deleuze and some strong connections one can easily establish with Fontaine-Wolf’s art: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 

The book on Francis Bacon is centred on sensation, which is obviously crucial for this exhibition, but Deleuze also proposes the body without organs relating it to a specific kind of antisocial (non-functional) artistic emancipation achieved namely by Artaud. In this respect the recurrence of the carcass in the artworks being exhibited in Woman, Flesh and Mirrors is quite literally a “body without organs” bringing themes such as: the abject, death, the existential but also aesthetics denying the functional aspect of the body and applying all that to visual creations. In that same book Deleuze also defines the figural as a nonfigurative fragmented body in tensional balance. This is achieved by making use of the diagram which is related to the lack of control and the abstract which is deeply rooted in invisible forces. In Fontaine-Wolf’s work the figural is transduced into the fragmentation and bodily repetitions of incomplete reflections on broken mirrors and the diagram becomes brushstrokes underlying the digital print as well as abstract elements of paint, drips and splashes which are actually digitally scanned and printed, but are just as real as a psycho-somatic illness. This is what I call the perfect digital simulacrum8 of serendipity. Other non-simulated fortunate accidents actually also occur but in other ways which are not mediated by the digital such as the partial tearing of a large-scale print while it is being mounted on metal. Finally, we should also mention defacement and what Deleuze describes as the perfect balance of all these painting related facts achieved by Francis Bacon on his canvas. In Fontaine-Wolf’s “physi-digital” works defacement takes a literal turn since there are almost no faces in her work. This painting related apparatus9 Deleuze proposes is sometimes described by some academics as another form of contemporary sublime10 

8Jean Baudrillard defines it the following way: "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real", just as in Disneyland as he illustrates.

9 Elements establishing a network of relations of power according to Foucault, Agamben and Deleuze (who later on makes this concept evolve into his famous Rhizome). 

10 such as David Johnson states in “Postmodern Sublime” (chapter 8, The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge University Press). 

(way beyond but still inspired by Lyotard’s inhuman). Others, such as myself, prefer to establish parallels with Nietzsche’s grand style described in his aesthetics where both Apollonian (order/beauty) and Dionysian (chaos/sublime) contribute to achieve a picturesque and oxymoronic beautiful sublimity much more powerful than any single aesthetic category. 

Deleuze’s other book on the Fold describes the Baroque’s most repeated element as being structural to the world and the origin of the extreme contrast between the reflection of light on a bent, shiny metal surface and the shadow/darkness generated by the unilluminated gap in the midst of each fold and counterturn. This can generally be justified by the counterreformation of the Roman Catholic church which intended to oppose the Protestant movements by exerting a profound fascination on ambivalent souls. But Deleuze’s perspective on Leibnitz takes the omnipresent “folds”, “unfolds” and “refolds” to convert his “Monads”11into contemporary Deleuzean “Nomads”12. This is how one may perceive contemporary art as echoes of Baroque strategies. The fascination and intense contrasts are stimulating and seducing but instead of bringing someone closer to the religious, they advertise commodities and consumer goods instead. The market rules everything through the myth’s13“invisible hand” (a myth in itself14). In Fontaine-Wolf’s oeuvre we have this same contrast between the reflection of light on metal (aluminium) and some deep dark backgrounds. This is why Fontaine-Wolf fits perfectly in Agamben’s definition of contemporary: belonging both to the current time but also to another time back in the past. Therefore, being contemporary implies being anachronistic and Fontaine-Wolf’s neo-Baroque15 does that perfectly. This baroqueness is even more apparent in her work through the Vanitas and Memento Mori represented by the contrast between the worldly pleasures of food/sex and the awareness of death which is persistently suggested. This oxymoron is present in each dead animal and white cloth reminiscent of a clinical 

11 Concept developed in The Monadology (1714), one of Gottfried Leibniz's most famous works. It is a short text which presents a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads (which means that which is one, has no parts (indivisible) and lacks spatial extension, hence being immaterial).12 Concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980). The origin of the word ‘nomad’ is not a romanticized image of actual nomadic peoples, but rather Immanuel Kant's claim that “outside of philosophy is a wasteland fit only for nomads”. The nomad stands for the power of the virtual and is a tendency towards deterritorialization, that can be found to some degree in all phenomena. They freely admit that “nomadology” creates structures that collapse, they also celebrate its ability to open a creative line of flight. 

13 As Roland Barthes defines it in Mythologies. 

14 “Invisible hand”: an expression used by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations explaining why each individual searching only for their own security of investment can have good effects on others. This expression is extremely popular and is taken as a central concept of his book: its meaning has been completely distorted and has been used as synonym of “markets self-regulation”. 15 There is even a reference to the fold in a title: “Enfold”. 

sudarium waiting for a bloody ritual. Vanity is central to this type of Baroque still life paintings and this is definitely enhanced by the focus put on the transient nature of everything commonly valued by man… Fontaine-Wolf recombines the archetypal portrait of the nude woman with the carcass and other foods considering carefully the underlying symbolisms and myths. On one hand, all of these elements can generally be considered worldly pleasures, however it is also true that the awareness of death implied by the carcass is extended to the white skin and aging body which will inevitably die along with every other organic element. This oxymoron resulting from the recombination of Vanitas and portrait is not common16 especially if it is based on a self-portrait of a partially undressed woman. Therefore Fontaine-Wolf’s “physi-digital” still-lives actually imply the performative and are just momentarily alive in our imagination. Where does this Baroque resonance take us? It reminds us that only the spiritual is meaningful, the beyond, the afterlife and the other worldly. This is the only possible answer to the shallowness of pleasure. 

Where else could this spiritual dimension be in Fontaine-Wolf’s work? Mirrors have actually been considered gateways for the prepared gaze. If “dressed” properly the mirror can be used for the occult art of divination called Scrying17 allowing access to visions of the future and other dimensions. This is the mystical side of this body of work which is alluding to the archetypal, the Jungian synchronicities and the occult. This neo-Baroque does not bring in the lost souls back to the one and true religion. It does quite the opposite. Similar to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals it inverts the status quo inviting spectators to forget their beliefs and get lost in the darkness while being seduced by bright, sharp reflections of mirrors and aluminium. The witchcraft behind the artwork proposes the inversion of hierarchies and values, the empowerment of women, their sexuality, their agency and their gaze. Just as Nietzsche points out that philologically the good was the brave, strong, rich and powerful. He also defines the bad as the opposite of what Catholicism proposes: the obedient, weak, poor and charitable. This is what this philosopher calls the “moral of the sheep”, proposing the creation of individual ethics instead of values imposed by others. The sheep are slaughtered in Fontaine-Wolf’s work to propose a similar rethinking of the role of women, and go against the conservative values which repeatedly deny them equality. 

Faceless universal18 bodies imply new feminist ethics and this means taking Hanna Arendt’s “banality of evil” as a given and suggests an inverted reinterpretation of many ancient myths. The danger comes from complacency and obedience to the roles, 

16 I can think of Holbein’s Ambassadors but it is quite uncommon.

17 Mentioned by the artist during the studio interview. 

18 Since it could be anybody. 

personas and interpretations imposed on us by society. Medusa for example has been seen throughout the ages as a monster and yet she was an actual victim since she was raped by Poseidon. Some of her extreme actions may be better understood if we bear that in mind instead of seeing her as an incarnation of pure evil... The centrality of gaze is evident since her power forces her killer Perseus to see her only through his mirrored convex shield to be able to behead her. We can identify some similarities with the use of Claude’s glass during the 18th century which was a dark mirror which enabled tourists to see the landscape as a “painting by Claude Lorrain”. This is inextricably connected to the emergence of the picturesque and how a mirror can change the way we see the world. This artistic scrying in Fontaine-Wolf’s art is the transposition from the picturesque to a defaced portrait structured by a woman’s gaze upon herself and the external pressures and aggressions she is forced to endure: 

She possessed a wonderful mirror, and when she stepped before it and said, “Oh mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?” it replied: “Thou art the fairest, lady Queen.” Then she was pleased, for she knew that the mirror spoke truly. Little Snow-White, however, grew up, and became pretty and prettier […] 

Brothers Grimm, Snow White 

Tragedy is according to both Schiller and Nietzsche announced by the sublime chorus in Greek drama and comes with the arrival of the inevitable: death and the divine. Bear in mind that the same capabilities which allowed the human species to prevail against all competitors are the same aptitudes forcing us to face the existential anguish inherent to the awareness of the end of our lives. As mentioned before, this Memento Mori is enhanced by the recurrence of the carcass which we are dressing by conceiving our foreseeable decay and eventually our final fall into the void of oblivion. This fear may well be the origin of our search for creation namely through art or religion. This existential tragedy is the gap no one ever managed to fill permanently which Lacan believes to be between the self and its mirrored image: “I see myself seeing myself”. This is the emptiness no one can run away from, this “apparition”19 of otherness… 

This mirrored otherness described above can take many shapes even within the same subject. Through the interaction with different apparatus, as defined by Foucault and Agamben, the self (which was never whole to start with) undergoes subjectification. This becomes clearer if we realize that the same person using a phone or a computer is never really the same subject. We can even suggest a subjectification associated to 

19 Reference to Vergílio Ferreira’s book entitled Aparição.

each app, almost an “appification” of the subject’s inherent multiplicity. What is being suggested is that subjectification also happens through the artist’s interaction with each artistic media. This is particularly relevant for Fontaine-Wolf since she still perceives herself as a painter who decided to integrate the digital in her process. This is described by herself almost as an inevitable consequence of the relevance of her digital life enhanced by pandemic abrupt behavioural changes. In order to remain authentic these experiences had to come through her work. In this process of wrapping her work with the digital originated what she now describes as the “physi-digital” process. This oxymoronic neologism implies a dialectic cycle of physical/conventional painting and the processing of those elements through scanning, printing and physical reworking which will then be scanned again… the repetition of this cycle allows for the simulacrum of serendipity mentioned above but it also has consequences on Fontaine-Wolf’s subjectification. By using diverse artistic media subjectification originates otherness and multiplicity. Variations of Fontaine-Wolf associated to each medium come up and an actual “pack of Wolves” starts “losing identity gaining an undefined quality”20. Probably this implies the acculturation art aims to achieve, as in old colonial dynamics, actually happens both ways: neither the artist nor the spectator remain the same. Attitudes, behaviours, processes and sensibilities are mutually affected, the artist through the process and the spectator through the work. Some deep questions remain regarding the digital… is it equally changing or altered by this process? Will it evolve becoming more and more human? Maybe the real danger is the human (artist and spectator) becoming less human and more artificial… A very poignant and uncomfortable statement comes to mind when thinking about AI and how pervasive the digital has become and I’ll simply quote it here because these issues are inevitably open-ended: 

We are all cyborgs, we need to know how the computer sees, to learn to recognize its gaze and then to imitate it. 

Nicholas Mirzoef on Donna Haraway, Visual Culture Reader 

20 Quoting Rebecca and applying her thoughts to this multiplicity and subjectification of the artist using multiple artistic media.

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

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