“Hello, my name is ORLAN, like that, with capital letters”, the French artist introduces herself at the doors of the RocioSantaCruz gallery, where she exhibits Las mujeres que lloran están enfadas, a series of digital collages in which she introduces herself into the portraits that Picasso made his then lover Dora Maar in the thirties, lending her his eyes, his teeth, his hands… until the model transformed into another woman, stopped crying and began to scream. “I don’t want to judge the pathological relationship between Picasso and Dora Maar, among other things because they are not here to defend themselves, and it was also another era. What I want is for the role of women in art history to be reconsidered, to bring them out of the shadows,” she notes.
ORLAN, thus, with capital letters, is a mutant and feminist artist whose work has always been focused on the pressure that society exerts on women’s bodies. Dressed in a purple suit to match her lips, half blonde, half brunette, on top of His eyebrows sport two of those silicone implants that are usually used to enhance the cheekbones that give him the air of a little devil. They are the culmination of a carnal art project, in which he turned her body into a sculptural object. Between 1990 and 1995, she underwent nine plastic surgery operations.
“My whole life is an attempt to get out of the box,” says the creator, who explains that her time in the operating room was not looking for an ideal of beauty, but to remove the mask with which she was born and reinvent it. “Creating myself by destroying any trace of fake identity,” she says, emphasizing: “I didn’t want to be more beautiful or lose years, but quite the opposite: uglier, more monstrous, undesirable.” Her body is his, she belongs to him.
Born Mireille Porte in Saint-Étienne in 1947, “I gave birth to myself when I was 16 or 17 years old,” she recalls. Later, already in her forties, she began that radical series entitled The Reincarnation of Santa Orlan, for which she rewrote Western art in her own face. One operation of hers altered her mouth to imitate that of François Boucher’s Europa, another of hers changed her forehead to imitate that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisade; she modified her chin to resemble that of Botticelli’s Venus; she borrowed the eyes from Gérôme’s Psyche and her nose is inspired by a sculpture of Diana.
“At first they thought that this was not art, that she was crazy. They said the same about the Impressionists and now their images are on chocolate boxes. I trust that same thing happens with my body”, she laughs. She has tried to donate it to a museum, with no luck so far. A pioneer of performance art, throughout her career she photographed herself nude, and she gave birth to an androgynous mannequin; she transformed herself into a kissing machine in exchange for five francs; she exposed the semen-stained sheets of her multiple lovers; at the Louvre Museum he glued a small triangle of his own pubic hair to the nude woman in The Kidnapping of Antiope and his painting The Origin of War showed a man with his sex erect, lying on a bed like the woman in the Courbet painting.
The series that he is now showing in Barcelona was carried out as a result of a commission from the Picasso Museum in Paris, where it was recently presented, and will later travel to PhotoEspaña. Exhibitions await him in Mexico, Luxembourg, France … he has published his autobiography Strip-tease in Gallimard. Tout sur ma vie, tout sur mon art and edited a musical album, Le slow de l’artiste, with which he wants to make slow dance known to young people who have never danced it.
And he still has time to maintain his particular war against influencers (“they lend themselves to playing all the stereotypes simply to sell a product and make an abominable society”), religion (“an invention to sustain patriarchy, as well as a source of pedophiles and war conflicts) and soccer (“factory of masculinity”). “I propose a collective suicide. Being a feminist doesn’t mean being a man-hating brat. I love men… Those who do not kill, do not rape, respect…”.
