White Cube Paris is pleased to present Ilana Savdie’s first solo exhibition in France, featuring a selection of new paintings and works on paper. Embracing performance as a transformative process, Savdie explores themes of transgression, identity and power. Drawing from a range of subjects and environments as source material, Savdie’s works of acrylic, oil and beeswax create finely detailed, fluid compositions, each riotous meditations on corporeal and metaphysical excess.

Drawing on a range of subjects and environments for her source material, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark making across each expansive canvas. Combining areas of stained and blurred colour with passages of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil and beeswax into paintings characterised by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded to the physical body.

Now living and working in New York, Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and draws extensively on the city’s tradition of Carnaval in her work. A week-long display of transgressive abundance, Savdie sees the queer potential in the Carnavalesque idea that figures and characters are mutable, with the potential to change at any moment. Connecting this to wider constructs of social and sexual identity, specifically Colombian figures such as the ‘Marimonda’ (a monkey/elephant hybrid with a phallic looking mask), assert an element of the transgressive, exemplifying the disruptive, socially-penetrating mockery at the heart of Carnaval display. ‘I loved the concept of this exaggeration of the body as a form of mockery and mockery as a form of protest’, Savdie has stated.

The influence of Carnaval extends to the artist’s use of colour, which is instinctual and often saturated in hue, a saccharine palette of pinks, purples, yellows and greens: ‘There’s just something about the excess of colour that feels like seductive subversion,’ Savdie has said. While this colourful exuberance points to a tactical subversion, it also makes reference to established visual tropes: to the representation of sexuality in culture and the bright colours associated with ‘queer space’.