At the last ArtParis, I was drawn to a tight close-up photograph of Madonna. But far from highlighting her, the deliberately wide-angle approach of the framing represented her with her features stretched to the extreme and her gaze contemptuous. She had nothing to do with the pulpy Italian mamma with a greedy look in the last Dolce and Gabbana campaign.
This photograph by New York photographer Jessica Craig-Martin was on display at the Galerie 64bis booth, along with other equally striking images: the body of a gleaming Ferrari that the owner is still polishing, a kissing session where the two protagonists wearing their finest jewelry barely dare to touch each other, or the visibly desperate gaze of a dog wearing a teacup-shaped collar sitting next to a Mondrian-style platform shoe.
Jessica Craig-Martin started out as a fashion photographer for many magazines, and continues to work as a photographer, as shown in this April 2010 series for Elle France magazine, while also offering more personal projects such as the “Privileges” series.
Through this series, she reveals to us, in a more artistic approach, the underbelly of a flashy, superficial American society, gathered in social cocktails in New York, in the Hamptons or in Cannes. She herself comes from the American upper middle class, the photographer has chosen to have a documentary approach, almost like an anthropologist, to show us the failings of this high society with scalpel-cut framing and a strong sense of detail. She offers us her deciphering of this society that is full of itself and has become its own caricature in a vanity fair that we cannot ignore. Jessica Craig-Martin gives us the opportunity to observe the powerful from the inside as if we were the worthy spectators of this theater of appearances.
Daughter of the famous artist Michael Craig-Martin, the teacher of artists Damien Hirst and Gary Hume, Jessica Craig-Martin photographs a world in which she knows all the codes. Having studied photography in New York, Jessica Craig-Martin’s work has been exhibited in several museums (Madrid, New York…) as well as in world renowned galleries. His works have also been the subject of numerous articles. The artist lives and works in New York.
With the series “Privileges”, the photographer denounces the hypocrisy of glamorous images conveyed by celebrity magazines. These images on glossy paper are of a rare perfection and reflect the opposite of a much more crude reality. Jessica Craig-Martin highlights and accentuates the caricature of a supposedly marvelous world, where the ferocity of the cut-outs reveals the artist’s sharp, authentic eye for the grotesque reality of high society, a veritable ” horror under the silk”, as American writer Glenn O’Brien describes her works as“still life in the traditional sense of the word”. The overdressed characters pursue the utopia of their youth seems to tell us “Arrival Lipstick”, with this red lipstick literally drooling and escaping from a tight smile coming out of lips refined and made bitter by time.
She also offers us her sharp artistic eye on unlikely and rather zany associations, observed during charity events: a parallel is made between small cocktail sausages and a similar looking ring in “Tye Dye Prada Weiners”. The artist also emphasizes certain color and shape combinations that are always somewhat related to food, between a white dress with black patterns and caviar canapés in “Hamptons Sun” and “Catered Caviar”. She presses where it hurts by emphasizing certain details, like her slippers clashing with the shoes of the “elegant”.
In spite of everything, the artist testifies to a positive vision in this repeated absurdity: “Why do people go to parties? They are all ugly. Nevertheless, people dress up in their best clothes and go out again and again. It’s a kind of strange optimism. It’s not so much a horrible truth, as it is the hope of glamour. There is something touching, in my opinion, in this disparity between the aspirations and the reality that we see“.
Yes, these uncompromising portraits are the new vanities of a superficial world, rich and spoiled but a little aware of its reality, between the will to appear, to create a character, to look young despite the marks of time passing. Under their mask of cruelty and acidity, these images become touching, the images of a society symbolizing the excessive consumption of which we are the witnesses.
Thank you Jessica for opening our eyes and showing us these contradictions, they are certainly those that await us…
Photo credit: ©Jessica Craig-Martin with the courtesy of Galerie 64bis
ZERO DEGREES C (AMFAR BENEFIT, CANNES)- 2008 C-Print – 63 * 91 CM edition of 5 copies + 5 AP
AIR KISS (WARLDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, NEW YORK) – 1999 – 69 X 91 CM
MONDRIAN TEACUP PUG (WATERMILL) – 2007 – 69,5 X 91,5 CM
ARRIVAL LIPSTICK ( AMFAR BENEFIT, CANNES) – 2008 – 69,5 X 91,5 CM
Gallery 64bis
64 bis, avenue de New-York 75016 Paris
+33 (0)1 46 47 53 50
Open Monday to Saturday from 11am to 7pm.
www.64bis.com
Marie-Odile Radom
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