TEXTS

Doll House Blues, Leila Renee, 2024

With Doll House Blues, Audrey Guttman offers an elaborate body of new work that keenly situates “the doll house” as a figurative site of intimacy and spectacle, ultimately dissecting the mechanisms of beauty and façade. Guttman wields blue cyanotype prints, collage, mixed media and sculpture to challenge our fractured performances of self—positioning “the doll house” as the metaphorical nucleus where these multiplicities converge. The show asks: How do we flee the confining “houses” of self, of performance, of scrutiny? It also considers the prospect of escape, wondering: How might we subvert those boundaries and smash their walls?

Audrey Guttman’s boldly multidisciplinary practice is buoyed by the vocabulary of collage, a medley of mediums, and in-depth research that offer her a vast web of visual and theoretical references. Doll House Blues epitomizes her aim to entwine fragments and forge meaning in the process of making and unmaking. For example, Guttman made cyanotype prints on lace doilies—adorning the home décor with hauntingly ethereal figures—to unify the show’s themes of domesticity, beauty and pretense. Further, the “Valley of the Dolls” installation features twenty “dolls” assembled using debris like found driftwood, sea urchins and shells. Instead of fashioning dolls from typical plastic, Guttman resists the aesthetics of conventional beauty and constructs organic figurines far realer than any Barbie. In “Fountain” Guttman molds an uncanny arrangement of synthetic hair—a symbol of erotic power— into an ironic “fountain” of youth. By meticulously rearranging raw materials, Guttman erects her own visual language.

This language contains echoes of philosophy. In 1999 French artist-activists Tiqqun introduced the “Young-Girl” as a theoretical symbol for an eager and passive participant of a tragically capitalist society. Guttman thoroughly researched Tiqqun’s concept to create works for this show, in which the “Young Girl” protagonist basks in newfound autonomy. Guttman’s “Young-Girl” denounces the arbitrary boundaries of beauty and bodies—things often dictated by capitalist whims. For example, in “C'est quoi un bon coup?” a falsely docile figure casts her red-adorned self in a dreamscape of mollusks. Moreover, “Philosophie de la modernité” challenges the bounds of the mirror by flashing a sly smile; the lipstick in “I, underneath” defiantly eschews perfection; and the close-up eye in “Philosophie de l'amour” reminds us of its function beyond beauty. Lastly, the brazen breast in “Moi & mes seins, mon nombril, mes jambes” and the exhibitionism of “My capricious little capri maiden” audaciously defy doll-like compliance.

Through a long process of accumulating layers, Audrey Guttman’s strenuous compositions mine the world to make meaning. Doll House Blues embodies her aim to assemble profound works that break free from the scrutiny of society’s relentless eye. Notably, nestled among the works is an original poem by Guttman. Poetry is a vital form for Guttman, who calls it “the hot pulsating heart of life.” She writes: “No more of these doll-like faces and busts and lips.” By anchoring her show within the figurative “doll house”, Guttman dares us to dream beyond its walls. Doll House Blues encourages us to escape the confines of a society that wants us to shrink our full selves into consumable canapés. Audrey Guttman urges us to witness the living, breathing beauty that surrounds and resides in us. And she reminds us that art is a balm we can use to forge selves that are whole, rooted and undeniably real.

Leila Renee

Tsimtsoum, Melanie Scheiner, 2023

Galerie Nathalie Obadia and Ketabi Bourdet are pleased to present Tsimtsoum, a solo exhibition by Audrey Guttman, on the occasion of Art Brussels 2023.

According to Kabbalistic cosmogony, Tsimtsoum refers to the first in a sequence of processes that led to the creation of the world. Before the beginning, there was only the ein sof, a single infinite unity of divine presence. To make room for finite, distinctive worlds to exist, God had to contract, or conceal, his infinite light. Then, in the first realm of Chaos, he emanated his light into ten vessels, thereby shattering them. The resulting shards, now coated in this divine luminescence, showered down into the next realm of Repair, where through their reconstruction, a connection to the divine may be restored.

Audrey Guttman’s new body of work conceptually and formally explores the paradoxes inherent to the notion of tsimtsoum to interrogate the very processes of artistic creation and spiritual awakening: the necessary dualities of absence and presence, contraction and creation, darkness and light. The tripartite cycle of revelation-destruction-repair is echoed again and again across religions and cultures, from Zen Buddhism to Jungian psychology. Here, it finds a near perfect analogy in the material process of collage, in which an infinite sea of symbols must be discerningly sifted through, cut apart, and reassembled to reveal new meaning.

As the tsimtsoum demonstrates, beginnings never take place quite at the beginning. Audrey Guttman knows this. Working with a vast archive of images, carefully culled over the years from vintage books, magazines, advertisements, and so on, she creates new fields of meaning across an array of media and processes. “Nothing comes from nothing”, she tells me on a recent visit to her studio, referring both to the carpet of cut-outs on the table before her and her view on the construction of individual identity and experience.

The Kabbalah deals heavily in metaphor, encouraging the interpretation of its messages on multiple registers, from the global metaphysical to the personal emotional and psychological, embodying the belief that the divine intersects all things in the universe. Similarly, Guttman’s practice, nourished by poetry, philosophy, psychology, theology, is deeply entwined with her way of being in the world, and her quest to make sense of it.

Light emerges as a central motif and medium throughout this exhibition. Here, Guttman experimented with cyanotype printing – a means of effectively painting with light and time. Imagining the cyanotype object as a vessel of light, the technical process echoes the narrative of tsimtsoum. The cyanotype’s rich blue tone– a hue with many spiritual and healing connotations – is a reaction to direct light exposure. The images that appear on the page in shades of white only emerge through the restriction of light to those areas, mirroring the concealment of the divine infinite light that gave rise to finite forms.

This spatial dialectic – concealing to reveal, withdrawing to expand – is also bound up in a temporal dimension, alluded to by the presence of time-measuring systems in the exhibition. Jacques Derrida referred to time as “the element of invisibility itself”, in that its accumulation can only be perceived in its depletion, a paradox formally harnessed by a glazed stoneware candle-clock and the large-scale image of an 18th century alarm system set against a desolate landscape.

Nevertheless, all work necessitates a beginning, a gambit – a defining first word, mark, or gesture from which all else will follow. But how to chart a course outside the established logics of space and time? Audrey Guttman’s oneiric compositions seem to find a way around this dilemma. Her paper-based alter egos, teleported into dreamy landscapes of infinite blue, roam amongst candles and chess boards, looking for answers in the light. Answers that, perhaps, were in the question, all along.

Melanie Scheiner

J’ai vu le fond de l’absurde et je n’ai pas fait le poids, Marcel von Bleustein, 2022

Words, on a table, scattered. Words that seek each other out, that sniff each other out, that find each other. Every day, like a trance, Audrey Guttman composes poem-collages at nightfall, to conjure up ghosts, to abolish the distance between what is said and what is not.

She humourously seizes on ready-made words, which she extracts from headlines (War! Invasion! Treaty!) transforming their political charge, or seizes superlatives from outdated advertisements (lotions, girdles, household appliances) which she salvages for poetry’s sake.

From Tristan Tzara to William Burroughs, from T.S. Eliot to Kathy Acker, cut-ups are a fixture of art history and literature. All writing is, in a way, a cut-up, because what is to write, if not to arrange words that belong to everyone? Burroughs believed that cut-ups could be a form of divination, proclaiming "When you cut into the present the future leaks out". Audrey Guttman might reply that cutting the past allows us to know ourselves, here and now. Where the Beats were looking for hallucinogenic distortions, Guttman flares the meaning of words transformed into almost-images; traces of ephemerality.

The wars follow one another and the advertisements too; the words come back, always the same ones. The artist brandishes the pieces of paper like flashlights, exploring invisible regions; finding, buried under the journalistic language of a bygone time; the matter of her own interior text. She recomposes a world, where time and space become fungible in her reverie. Perhaps that is what writing is, what art is: a dialogue between the living and the dead, an anonymous letter who echoes in all her artistic production.

Marcel von Bleustein

I’ll be your mirror, Boris Bergmann, 2022

In the Velvet Underground song, "I'll be your mirror", the singer Nico proclaims: "When you think the night has seen your mind / That inside you're twisted and unkind / Let me stand to show that you are blind / Please put down your hands / 'Cause I see you." These words echo at the heart of Audrey Guttman's work. For her, collage has the same effect as a distorting mirror that, despite everything, sees.

Born from an infinite array of pre-existing images - visions torn from old magazines, advertisements, traces of a forgotten past that Audrey Guttman carefully preserves - collage blurs lines. It allows the artist to disappear, to feel safe. However, it is also a revealing agent : each work becomes the reflection of an intense inner life. Alternately crossed by emotions, memories, sensations, collage defies fixed images, their definite and limited meaning. It works with the image like the poem does with the word.

By associating visions apparently opposed - in the same way as a baudelairian correspondence or a synesthesia - the artist cracks open meaning, she multiplies it. And allows the viewer to find his or her own troubling reflection, to associate with it a deep emotional state, a secret shape, an intimate color. Thus, each glance will find its unique and singular part. Like a bit of one’s mental life, one’s existence within to use an expression by Michaux of which Audrey Guttman is - and which, in the collage, reveals itself.

After having tried all practices and all acts - painting, acting, drawing - collage came to Audrey Guttman as an obvious choice. First of all for its autobiographical dimension. "My identity has never been one and indivisible," the artist acknowledges, "the only thing I claim are my own assemblages." She loved collage, "a modest and humble art, made of trials and errors". Through this intensive practice, the artist saves images that are doomed to oblivion. Facing them is a mix of trance and tenderness: Audrey Guttman leafs through them, searches. She feels, perceives that this vision must be kept, this page must be ripped and not another. A powerful obviousness manifests itself : the image imposes itself to her as if it wanted to survive. So she cuts it out, keeps it. Then she turns around the image, dances around her. She tries an association, lets it rest, waits. Finally, she glues. The next day, she will repeat this act, methodically, like a saving exorcism or a meticulous choreography.

Through the magical power of collage, the image is reborn from its ashes. This idea of rebirth is the pulse of the exhibition "I'll be your mirror". As Audrey Guttman confesses: "The planet is burning, the apocalypse is playing out before our very eyes." To counter the announced end of the world, the artist puts a spin on Boris Vian’s famous sentence and turns it in a magical proposal: I will spit ... becomes I will dance on your graves ... Duly noted. Her characters dance on ruins as in A dance for the end of the world where we see an ambiguous dancer waltzing with a nuclear explosion.

The end of the world is also the end of images. Faced with the infinite surplus of images that our retinae are forced to consume every day, faced with this new class struggle won long ago by the screens, Audrey Guttman's collages give new meaning to buried images by forcing us to slow down, to take our time, to let ourselves be seduced. For example, she cuts out advertisements where the often naked bodies of women are originally used to promote the sale of this or that product. Audrey Guttman reverses the primary function: she flips the images before gluing them, thus revealing what chance printed on the back of these shots...

Collage becomes her weapon. Against the ready-made images of misguided advertising. And against the layers of a social skin that force us to mask our sincere emotions. In The other me, the duality is obvious, the personality seems much more complex inside than on its presentable facade. Like in the work The dinner party, which shows a suitably presentable woman, in the middle of a conventional and stereotyped ceremony, boiling from the inside to such an extent that her whole body catches fire: she becomes perpetually incandescent. In L'attente, the naive posture of another young woman reveals the solidity of a cliff.

Audrey Guttman likes to show what bodies hide. She has also created a whole series of « live collages » to capture the body in its naked truth. In a drawing studio, in front of models. And in the voguing class of the Centre National de la Danse. She captured the movements of the body not by drawing but by cutting. Thanks to collage, we are now warned: we must see underneath. And beyond.

The inner life and the jubilation of bodies: collage allows these two intimate impulses to be united. To counter a too-superficial social life. To subvert the bodies frozen in one and the same identity or one and the same kind. Audrey Guttman reconstructs a complex, moving and sometimes even dancing world. A fundamentally alive world — of which her collages become intuitive mirrors. They reveal what our skins hide. They give freedom to what our images bury.

Boris Bergmann

Beyond the face, Chiara Vecchiarelli, 2021

Audrey Guttman's figures inhabit the margin, the threshold on which the image is overturned, transcending time and space. Moving towards the imaginal dimension, they have discarded the meanings into which they had been confined, through the enforcement of a narrative that was too narrow for them. The empty space they occasionally leave on the page is merely the negative of a story - one reluctantly listened to at first, then abandoned. The image's white space that looks like an enigma, a relic in reverse, is but the faded memory of an oft-dominant narrative, one that’s accompanied by a certain gaze on the body, full of constraints and conditions.

Beginning with the image, the figure literally shakes off the inhibiting talk carried by our gaze and disinhibits itself, creating a new configuration, an unexpected meaning. It’s almost as if the page, configured as it was, was too small and needed an opening, capable of enlarging it. However, it doesn’t grow in size but in depth - of both the sensible and the intelligible, at the same time.

When Audrey Guttman's images do not burst out of the page, emerging from the picture and exploding into space, they live on the edge, and work at the point of contact between the worlds they hold together, like a cosmos that incessantly creates its own constellations.

Sometimes, the figure that has slipped out of her frame reappears right next to it, facing the other way, showing the reverse of the page on which it had been forced. The silhouette is filled with that which it unknowingly contained, the promise of a freer meaning. Fundamentally, it is chance that has dictated the coexistence of two images on two different sides of the same page, in the barely-there thickness of the paper.

The procedure applied by the artist recalls the composition techniques of Dadaist poems, whose authors had made chance their own compositional principle, except that Guttman adds a new awareness of the emancipatory role of the image. The chance that governs the inversive logic of the artistic gesture sometimes leads to a glimpse of the fragment of another body, also freed, at least in part, from the fixity of the stereotype.

Basically, what the printed image has, is a body of paper, and this body is often shared by another image. In Human Theater III, on the reverse of the silhouette of a woman lying on a carpet, a flat object of desire, we catch sight of a woman's face full of intensity and a story yet to be told. The image, relational importance par excellence, in saving one existence can only offer to save others. It is the possibility itself of a life that is not always caught up in the dictates of others but in a creative process, as if it were itself an image capable of going beyond the space-time limits of a society that instead asks for unison.

En proie à l'étoilement shows a starry space in lieu of the prey aimed at by a camera lens. The figure becomes the cosmos, and in a simple inversive gesture embraces the entire universe. The imaginal relationship to the other is inevitably at the centre of Audrey Guttman's research. Her figures reveal others or accompany one other in configurations filled with a tactility that invites us to respect the other.

The contact between bodies as well as between images that Guttman's collages invent is in turn a metaphor of the artistic process like a ‘feeling your way’, almost the manner of being of which the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas writes in his essay "Totality and Infinity". It is in this philosophical work that the author shapes the concept of beyond the face as a means of connection. In front of the face of the other, Lévinas writes, we can do nothing but experience an uncontrollable emotion, an existence whose boundaries break up into infinite possibilities of being. The face of the other, in its vulnerability, asks us to respect it in terms of a diversity that cannot be contained, and that places us at the very origin of ethics. Beyond the face is the caress: a gesture capable of transcending the perceptible insofar as it escapes both personalization and objectification. The caress to which The Inner Hand seems to allude does not exist. It merely floats, just as the fragments of images encountered in the collages do. It seeks neither a person nor a thing, but gives birth to an intermediary dimension in which we are no longer totally ourselves but are not other than ourselves, either. We are perhaps the possibility of a relationship, a beyond the face that the image suggests, which art allows us to experience.

In the middle ground where worlds collide, poetry lives according to the same logic as images. A logic of contingency according to which every image, every poem defines its own principle through the encounters of life. According to Jiří Kolář, with whose works Guttman dialogues, a collage demands its own composition in the same manner as a poem. Life, too, Kolář wrote, is full of eruptions, crystallizations and landslides. There is always something in it that explodes or implodes, that steps out of the picture or withdraws in it. An unpredictable je-ne-sais-quoi, as in dreams, which are there to be dreamed as life is there to be lived.

Chiara Vecchiarelli, philosophy lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, curator, and author

Where the years do not turn the pages, Maddalena Pelù, 2021

In this exhibition titled after a verse from Agnolo Poliziano, the Belgian artist Audrey Guttman presents works inspired by the role and position of Il Salviatino over Florence, merging the palazzo’s perspective and her own to reinterpret the symbols and clichés of the Florentine capital. The artist gives us access to a new space-time, free of the usual constraints of “present, past, future” and “here and there”, leading us to envision another possible interpretation, suspended and dreamlike: where the years do not turn the pages.

The title lends the project its name, not only by referencing the artist’s daily ritual of turning pages to select the images that emerge, but also the re-interpreting of the Florentine imagery and political history. In his famous Stanze, Poliziano described the kingdom of Venus in gauzy verses that inspired Sandro Botticelli to famously depict the goddess. Audrey Guttman addresses the cracks in the traditional depiction of femininity and of the city as its avatar, bringing to life a new kingdom in which everything is free, subverted, exchanged, and rendered cheekily metaphorical. Through overlapping and cutting fragments, she provides a new perspective on the artistic and political heritage of the Renaissance capital, generating a metamorphosis of the gaze thanks to postcards and other so-called “tourist” objects.

The artists’ collages highlights the iconography of one of the most attractive cities in the world, as she duplicates and manipulates the images of the key paintings of its quintessential museum, the Uffizi. Reared on stories of Florence’s classicism, the Medici’s cultural glory and the almost intangible depth of the city’s history, Audrey Guttman feels the urge to slice into this heritage to find a more personal relationship with its oft-consumed beauty.

Maddalena Pelù

PDF versions :

Doll House Blues, Text by Leila Renee, January 2024

Tsimtsoum, Text by Melanie Scheiner, April 2023

J’ai vu le fond de l’absurde et je n’ai pas fait le poids, Text by Marcel von Bleustein, June 2022

I’ll be your mirror, Text by Boris Bergmann, February 2022

Beyond the face, Text by Chiara Vecchiarelli, July 2021

Where the years do not turn the pages, Text by Maddalena Pelù, June 2021