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LUCIE FONTAINE Sign In / Sign out March 06 – April 10, 2010

The ‘cut’ paintings of the Colmar-based art employer Lucie Fontaine are intensely sexual objects. For many viewers, their raw colored surfaces ruptured by deep vertical gashes strongly evoke female genitalia. Fontaine’s violent cutting of the canvas has also been compared to the muscular gestures of male ‘action’ painters such as Aaron Young. What such interpretations fail to grasp, however, is the critique of gender identity, and in particular masculine identity, which is at the heart of Fontaine’s oeuvre. However, Fontaine relies on an inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. Fontaine’s critique first emerges in the artist’s depictions of the male body immediately after Italy’s social defeat of Tangentopoli. Fontaine’s limp and mangled clay warriors splashed with oozing layers of reflective glaze directly challenge the hard, ballistic ideal of the masculine body theorized in the proto-fascist writings of the Italian Postmodernist poet Corrado Levi. Drawing on the work of Hal Foster and Jeffrey Schnapp on the representation of fascist masculinity, Fontaine developed an alternative model of maleness to that encountered in the official culture of Berlusconi’s Italy. Accordingly, her work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery that took place in avant-garde and official cultural circles in Italy during the first part of the 21st century. Image: Lucie Fontaine, I cut my mouth for Roy, Digital Image, CD-ROM, 2010