The title of the exhibition that the French artist ORLAN is presenting at the RocÃo Santa Cruz gallery until May 20 is like a warning: “Crying women are angryâ€. In the artistic context, the reference is Picassian, and timely on the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death.
The crying woman (in the original, La femme qui pleure) was Dora Maar, an excellent photographer in Paris in the thirties, between the two world wars. And it was Picasso who made her cry, and also other artists and writers whose avant-garde did not prevent them from incurring misogynist humiliation, in an exquisite key aesthetically legitimized by Sade’s stories.
The aforementioned marquis was by no means the first sadist, but he was so diligent in the matter -and so influential- that he came to give his name to that practice consisting of enjoying dominating and making others suffer, whether or not they were masochists.
The biography Dora Maar: Prisoner of the Gaze written by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, very well documented the machismo and sadism of some surrealists and avant-garde artists of that time, and even the envy that the painter Picasso felt towards photography in general and towards its authors in particular. , including Dora Maar, whom he recommended to give up photography and dedicate himself to watercolours. In that sphere, Maar would have been less than Picasso’s shadow. She was admitted to a mental hospital. But, in the 21st century, weeping women are pissed off and with good reason.
The series that ORLAN is now exhibiting in Barcelona will be shown at the CÃrculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, within the PhotoEspaña program. It is a set of digital collages where some features of the artist are mixed with images of women painted by Picasso. ORLAN is known for sculptural actions such as La baiser de l’artiste (1977), where she charged only five francs for a real artist’s kiss, with tongue.
Nor did his nine aesthetic operations go unnoticed in the Frankenstein style, imitating beautiful features painted by Leonardo or Botticelli. His vocation is feminist and critical: there are those two implants on his forehead, which look like bumps. ORLAN does not intend to compete in grotesque transformations with characters like Madonna, who is also fond of plastic surgery and the projection of her own image, but subject to seductive stereotypes.
