Artists

Zoé Bernardi

Press release

Zoé Bernardi’s exhibition “I wanna be loved by you” explores the way femininity is constructed, transmitted and transformed through images. Borrowed from Marilyn Monroe’s song, the title offers from the outset a compelling tension: that of a femininity at the same time desired, manufactured and projected. How to construct oneself as a woman through the images that precede us, flow through us and at times, assign us a role to play? It all began with Marilyn Monroe. Discovered on television in childhood, her image generated an immediate confusion: fascination, distance, impossibility to match. Marilyn became much more than an icon of Hollywood cinema. She acted as a matrix for femininity, an industrial model that could be reproduced and multiplied to infinity. An image that is disseminated, repeated, distorted, and from which other figures are generated. The exhibition opens on a gesture of embodiment: a self-portrait in which the artist makes herself up as Marilyn. With that gesture a shift is initiated: that of a body that confronts an image already formed, an archetype of femininity. Made by photoengraving and in several assembled panels, the image plays on the confusion between the apparition of an icon and the presence of the artist. Alongside that image, photographs of teenagers remind us how the issue of the construction of the self is fashioned and fed very early on by images and representations of the feminine. With that realisation, the exhibition takes us on a journey between several embodiments of femininity. First the Hollywood blondes, those actresses coming from the post-Marilyn American studios, whom the industry sought to reproduce on the same template of glamorous, spectacular and interchangeable blond women who were absorbed then erased by that same system. Some became famous, other ended up forgotten, but all of them were confronted with the violence of a system that objectified them and considered them as archetypes easy to duplicate. Through photoengravings made from archive material, Zoé Bernardi reactivates their presence and gives them back some agency. In superimposing images from their youth with images of their old age, she creates moving figures that have lived through times. Split in two, blurred, and resisting the definite quality of icons, faces become chimeras. Behind the myth, personal trajectories resurface of women and continue to exist despite the narrative aimed at reducing them to an image. The series of Divas follows the outcome of an extended immersion within a community of trans women and transvestites. Here femininity is approached as a language: a series of signs—makeup, heels, artifice—not endured but played with, magnified and reappropriated. Those stereotyped codes become tools for creating the self. They relate to a power of expression, a capacity to generate one’s own image. Femininity is claimed as an active force: in their own way, the Divas embody the classic image of the eternal feminine in an act of personal reinvention. The show moves on to a more personal territory with portraits of the artist, her mother and her grand-mother. Alongside the glamorous Hollywood models, those family figures represent another genealogy. Their femininity exists against the prevailing representations: more rough, more free, more punk. However, they occupy in the exhibition the same mythological place: they are figures of projection and transmission. One of the themes that pervades the whole of Zoé Bernardi’s work is that of the matrix: what produces images, what reproduces them but also what is transmitted from one generation to the next. This reflection is extended in Camouflages, a series made from photographic glass plates representing the artist, her mother and her grand-mother. Each image presents a slight shift: an accessory, a feature, a detail is enough to interfere with the reading of a face. Identities become blurred, the signs of gender pass from one figure to the other while the reflections and transparency of the glass make any definite appropriation impossible. Bodies appear like evolving constructions, irreducible to categories aimed at making them permanent. They all question the same thing: what it means to inhabit one’s femininity. Not as an essence but as a space to occupy, unpredictable, at times constricting, at times liberating, but always filled with tensions. With “I wanna be loved by you”, Zoé Bernardi doesn’t seek to define femininity but to follow its transmission and metamorphoses through images, and to display its power of transformation. From Marilyn Monroe to family figures, from Hollywood icons to more intimate images, the exhibition creates a space the artist constructs like a field of resonances in which the feminine subject is fashioned in the movement of its representations. Marilyn emerges as a matrix: a founding image Zoé Bernardi reactivates, shifts and recreates, and from which other figures are fashioned. In that flux orchestrated by the artist, images are never completely fixed. They echo one another, intertwine, disappear and reappear. The icon itself breaks up as a stable form to become a presence in flow. Here femininity is constructed in the way it is played with, transmitted and continues to exist through images, in another way. — Marilou Thirache