Chloe Piene

Armless

Armless by Chloe Piene was executed very rapidly suggests in an elliptical manner an ominous world. A human silhouette is suspended in the space of the page. In a joyful and macabre game, this bust is animated by a swinging movement which is so violent that the lines of the drawing overtaken by this energy no longer feature anything of the body. The figure in Armless tapers away. Muscular legs turned upright spin down into a disintegrating torso. Lines, that in another drawing would sketch out contours and volume, here seem to be strands of flesh. They hang down from full feet and flutter into nothingness as the form becomes less and less present. The armlessness is named but the lack of a head, which one can possibly make out becoming strewn lines, suggests a top-to-bottom dissolution. The powdery black line of the charcoal no longer defines the figure; forms decompose and dissolve on the white page. In the tracing of her drawings or the surface of her sculptures, the artist generates non-distinct moments between the form of ideas and the chaos of matter. The character evokes at once a puppet, a hangman or an écorché. The legs are the only connection of this body, devoid of a head or arms, with the world. Rather like in Rodin’s L’homme qui marche (Walking Man, bronze) (1900-1907), a sculpture with no head or arms, this ‘mutilated’ body questions the rapport of the senses with the world. According to the artist: “The line I enjoy riding is between the erotic and the forensic – the obscurity and the clarity; where you get these two real extremes that come together in ways that clash and combine somewhat violently.” (Artnews, September 2006). Through the prism of sensation, her works touch on eroticism, vanity, on what is morbid, intimate, grotesque. Fascinated by horror movies, Chloe Piene explores the anatomy of the human body by questioning the limits between the subject and the world, between interior and exterior, pleasure and pain.