Isabelle Plat is an artist who addresses the most serious societal topics, but she does it with humour, distance and a fresh stance. Loyal to her historical lines of research, she always intervenes where you don’t expect her to. Do not stop at the lighthearted aspect of her work, and always look for the political message that hides behind her long-considered series of works.
In her work, all the topics are addressed with a pinch of salt, and more specifically, often with derision. Humour is the best weapon of her feminism, which expresses itself through a joyful profusion of the schematic representation of man’s genitals.
The simple and explicitly phallic shape of the table feet made of mirror-polished stainless steel that Isabelle designed sums up the critical symbolic element that she assigns to her representations of male genitals, all the while creating an elementary example usable sculpture. While the fineness of the genitals made out of steel sheets give the table a feeling of fragility, the individual and derisory castration complex is underlying in its premonitory anticipation of an inevitable and imminent crumbling (of the table) of the world…
The concept of usable sculpture, which Isabelle Plat has now perfectly developed, has been consubstantial of her work since the beginning: when we met as students, over twenty five years ago, she was already studying the relationship between man and nature and cultivated the paradox by inviting us to sit –carefully- into giant peppers (made of synthetic fur) and light ourselves up– summarily- with cyclopean leeks (made of resin or glass fibre)!
A bit New-Age in her belief in an eco-pedagogical action based on art, through her use of sometimes anachronistic materials, and in her belief in humankind, a bit Pop in the seventies-inspired schematisation of her shapes, and the magnification –especially when she represents them out of scale- of daily objects, Isabelle Plat has built, over two decades, a very coherent and very bold body of work that seems to be wanting us to forget the last forty years of harmful growth, by immersing us into a world built on the memory of simple pleasures.
Uncompromising in her convictions, therefore continually questioning all the “renewabilities”, Isabelle now presents us with a series of exhibits made of human hair, with which she adorns –again cultivating the paradox- our preferably smooth patches of smooth or epilated skin… She samples enough material from people to create these membranes between our bodies and our environment and she triggers in us a multitude of salutary questions that had been deeply buried until now…
Eric Mouchet
MORE INFORMATIONS:
// Biography
// Press
// www.isabelleplat.fr
EXHIBITIONS:
// A un cheveu de l’usage (05/12/2015-16/01/2016 | Paris)
// Se mettre dans la peau de l’autre (Art Paris 2019 | Grand Palais Paris)
// Je t’ai dans Sa peau (14/03-27/06/2020 | Paris)
// Portraits d’usage et hors d’usage (25/04-13/07/2024 | Brussels)
PUBLICATION:
// A un cheveu de l’usage, Isabelle Plat, GEM, 2015
Artists