ABOUT
“Objectify, savor art”
by
Yves Sabourin
Since her beginnings, visual artist Corinne Fhima has been building, carving, scratching, and shaping multiple perspectives in both her discovered and developed mediums and her aesthetic expressions, daring to blend the lessons she has learned with her research, experiences, and discoveries. She is an artist with multidisciplinary DNA.
Today, the artistic material developed by Corinne Fhima is a combination of materials and techniques that unfold in attitudes that mix, without preconceptions, suavity, such as the grating and intoxication of color or the tactile through many traditional materials, but also those from outside the territory of the plastic arts. The artist possesses this ease that belongs to those who know how to feed without prejudice, make their own personal and family stories and, who have no restraint in slipping, sliding in order to cultivate this constant open-mindedness that suits visionaries and remains essential in creation.
His various training courses between image, new techniques and the more classical one of fine arts, just as essential since it is associated with the history of art, provide him with the necessary autonomy. Painting and its representations certainly figure as the first breeding ground for the germination of his future expressions without putting aside a triple indivisible attitude that are humor, derision and seriousness. It is enough to observe his LILI PEAU D'CHIEN painted during his studies in 1989, to be faced with a work that already presents the ardor of his artistic material in fusion, where popular culture flourishes between the song of Aristide Bruant (1) and the silhouette of a Marianne, very cheeky already having the desire to experiment with bodily expression.
In her practice, Corinne Fhima is unreservedly interested in everyday and improbable materials, without forgetting textiles, their techniques and renderings too often analyzed "lightly" and which cheerfully integrates her work in an inseparable way with other media. The artist has understood that since the history of our civilizations, textiles have been part of creation, just as the analysis of a work of art should be done by taking into account materials and techniques. No borders delimit the territory of aesthetic prospection developed by the artist who has assimilated over time our history, family traditions, education but also solid heritage notions of the most extensive. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the pig - the protective animal of "her" family - became her favorite model. Pig is from then on her ideal ally that allows her to develop and compose her works in drawing, painting, collage and sculpture.
After graduating from fine arts in 1992, the artist created a series of mixed-media works, COCHONS DE COCHON, in which she expressed her pleasure in using, without apprehension, all the materials that stimulated her tactile mind, while combining them with painting. To model the silhouette of COCHON PAILLE, she used straw. For COCHON FEU DE LA RAMPE, she installed two photographic portraits on a mattress canvas held together by two old pieces of wood with yellow apples nailed to them: one, a beautiful pig's head, and the other, a face from a primitive painting; the whole thus making reference to a star's mirror with more than questioning reflections. With COCHON DE BAIN, she composes a large piece of 230x150 cm with a niche that resembles a bathing cap and in which she paints her blue pig, draped in a bath towel and whose snout is adorned with a tin tripod colander. In this gallery of portraits, the artist claims and confirms: "no restraint if necessary."
In 1996, the exploitation of the pig silhouette continued with a delirious painting, a diptych daring to mix surrealism and economic reality. COCHON UNITED COLORS thus recalls the great and innovative advertising campaign launched in the 1990s by the Italian clothing brand Benetton (2) with its historic slogan "United Colors Of Benetton". But here, it is Pig who becomes the slogan and is displayed on rolling billboards. Also in 1996, COCHON OPTIMISME DÉMESURÉ, is composed of a canvas on which Pig is treated like a pig - an animal to be consumed - and who reflects on his future, materialized by an enormous sausage in salted meat-colored fabric and placed right in front of his snout. Later in 2001, Pig, still present in COCHON CRISE IDENTITAIRE, is still questioning himself. The portrait of the beloved animal, quickly painted in pink acrylic, is delighted to be able to interact this time with another animal, taken from the "meat" industry, a hairy chicken, completely naked and sculpted in "candy pink" polyester plastic; clumsily installed on a galvanized steel bucket, itself balanced on a stool, it is as if held on a leash to the canvas. An installation for useless confidences!
In 2002, with PIG REVISITED ENERGY, Corinne Fhima modeled an enormous wounded flying pig, bandaged with a red cross, in gray, padded felt, and installed it on the wall. Just below, three galvanized steel basins, in which immaculately white plastic bones simmer in blood-red felt, are placed on stools. Both the symbolism and the inspiration are on display: it is the felt that saves the totem animal and gives the artist the opportunity to pay a burlesque but sincere homage to the artistic work carried out since the 1960s by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) around this saving material that is felt: a prehistoric non-woven fabric composed of animal material from Central Asia.
In 2005, Corinne Fhima decided to physically integrate her work. She erected her self-portrait, took the name Ève, and developed her series PIG SERIE AND EVE, in which she depicts her head wearing a wig, her feet in boots, her hands sometimes in gloves, and her body always naked, protecting her very personal parts with digital camouflage. In TO BE, against a camouflage canvas background and surrounded by several painted or video-imaged Pigs, the artist wears "camouflage-print" boots, a curly blonde wig, and, incidentally, pink silicone gloves, the kind used for washing dishes. Her hands hide her genitals. Is Eve trying to blend in with the animal kingdom out of solidarity? If this is the reason, then the traditionally military camouflage pattern—a French creation dating from the First World War—is transformed here into a rustic motif, as if in a green setting, to allow her to live peacefully. With EVE AND BUREN STORY, she pays a nod to the work of artist Daniel Buren and his use of the famous striped tarpaulin since 1965. Eve, accompanied by Pig, is represented three times, wearing a snout against a background of vertical, horizontal and colorful stripes. She raises enormous, plump, padded red satin mouths in reference to the delirious and brilliant 20th-century Spanish artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989), who was inspired by the mouth of actress and singer Mae West (1893-1980), a true sex symbol of the 1920s, to create his "Sofa Boca" (1937). Other artists from the history of art are also highlighted, such as Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and his famous painting "Birth of Venus" (1484-1485). In the composition VENUS (2005), Corinne Fhima plays with transposing the goddess onto camouflage fabric. Her silhouette is painted "apple green" and her hair is as red as an orange. Then, she pastes photos of three pigs onto it and, to provide a response, she places a television on the floor accompanied by a libidinous snail in strawberry red fabric. Even more intrepid, EVE ON THE PROMISED LAND 3 is inspired by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (1942), known for his erotic bandages or kinbaku-bi from the Land of the Rising Sun. Thus, Eve in light volume appears "hovering" above the beach of Tel-Aviv, her sex draped in a scarf with the striped pattern of a tallit (3) and tied up, sausage-shaped: her first bas-relief!
In 2008, Corinne Fhima staged Pig in EVE WAITING FOR LOVE. She depicts it in a crude way, like a pig's head on a butcher's stall, and beside her, in a photo sublimated on a tarpaulin, Eve is seen from behind, wearing red boots against a background of orange horizontal stripes. In front of her, on the ground, stand three cactus sculptures fashioned from traditional mattress canvas or red leatherette and planted in silver pots.
From then on, Corinne Fhima embarked on the path of creating volume in her sculptures or bas-reliefs, made possible by this process that the artist developed by working from her sublimated photographs on different textiles, according to the desired renderings, which she cuts, doubles, and joins with a seam and introduces padding. This is how in 2011 Corinne Fhima created EVE CHASSE PECHE TRADITION. On a resolutely flat photographic support decorated with an oriental rug, the artist installed Eve in volume, completely naked, her eyes censored, her head down and adorned with a deer antler that runs sinuously over her body.
In 2012, Corinne Fhima visually and skillfully increased the carnal intensity by becoming an object of desire, an edible desire. This is why she does not hesitate to dress up again in order to don disguises with accents of erotic fantasies populated by heroines of fables, comics or television series. With EVE WAITING FOR THE WOLF, the painting takes the form of an enormous polystyrene food tray in which she loves Eve disguised as Little Red Riding Hood, vacuum-packed. In 2014, for EVE MARKET SERIE and EVE FACTORY (in 2015 at 8ème Avenue Art Fair on the stand of the Galerie Baudoin Lebon then on the occasion of an invitation to China in 2019), the artist added a new medium: her own person. Eve becomes reality and poses in a Chinese supermarket warehouse setting between displays and trolleys. The artist represents herself in what can be defined as a performative installation. She is the "factory manager" dressed simply in a blonde wig, a white coat, blue protective cuffs, and black boots. Eve herself self-promotes her new vacuum-packed products, ready-to-consume art objects. Corinne Fhima, with serious play, takes us on a play of mirrors that transports the work within the work, the artist within the artist, a mise en abyme with multiple perspectives. Baroque in the service of the commercial!
In 2015, EVE "POULETTE" unveiled an Eve freed from any decor. No background, no support, just her body sublimated on a synthetic canvas that becomes volume, like a small figurine or a fetish doll to hang. The artist chose to reuse the 2003 Eve represented in TO BE; this time the chest is bare and the eyes are censored with the black rectangle.
To continue her self-promotion between 2017 and 2018, Corinne Fhima produced a filmed performance in which she transformed herself into Wonder Woman and gathered a team of sales representatives. They all marched under the banner EVE DELIVERY IN through the streets of Paris to distribute "vacuum-packed art trays." Eve also performed solo, both at the Butte Montmartre and in Slovakia's Bratislava. In 2019, to amplify her critical and picturesque analysis of art and money, Corinne Fhima took on consumerism and transformed Wonder Woman into EVE HOME, who rodeos on a gigantic red lobster like her boots. This animal, already encountered in 2018 during the Nuit Blanche, is said to possess the power to "clean the slate" by evacuating things from the past that are no longer of interest. This Eve-Wonder Woman, against the backdrop of "The Wave" engraved by Hokusai (1760-1849) in 1831, becomes the face of a brand of household linens with bathroom sets, ranging from shower curtains to bathrobes and from towels to rugs. How can you not drown in your bathroom with this American superheroine: "Oh! Look into the morning light - The flag by your songs celebrates in glory" (4).
This craze for all these materials resulting from overconsumption and cheap products allows Corinne Fhima to engage in large wall works. In 2016 in Paris during the Nuit Blanche, the artist created a sculpture composed of shiny silver balloons inflated with helium, marked with her effigy with a working motor tricycle as a base. The artist does not hesitate with jubilation to take the path of supermarkets to pick all kinds of flowers in synthetic fabric, to play "miraculous fishing" of objects and inflatable buoys in order to experiment with these new mediums. In 2019 at the 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou (formerly Canton) in China, the artist created her first large wall relief EVE PARADISE OK of 300x 300x 25 cm. It is in the shape of a hand with a closed fist and a raised thumb like the sign of "ok". It's like a flowerbed, straightened and modeled entirely with fake flowers, in which float, among other things, inflatable subjects such as a lecherous rabbit with red eyes, a Minnie Mouse, and a "smiley face." Is this the dream paradise with all its festive colors or rather paradise on earth with all its colorful, overdone, and obscure aspects? EVE PARADISE OK was revived in 2021 at the Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus. Composed in a more unhinged way, the silhouette is this time marked by a ribbon of LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and adorned with artificial flowers and inflatable objects for water games: a very yellow smiley face hides behind an enormous transparent red heart that rides a yellow banana with black lines, itself placed on a gigantic slice of red watermelon with apple-green skin and which hides a small orca. Below, a starfish, opposite, the lucky eye, a Mediterranean tradition, and, above, in the thumb, a flying duck trying to blow into a lemon-yellow snorkel. This accumulation, which seems improbable, is not, quite the contrary. Because what does the number of carats matter in order to evaluate a form of purity such as that which can be found in accumulation? It is a charge in materials as in artistic statements since it adds its performances. Eve returns, posing in front of the work as a "factory director" from 2015. Then Eve takes on the role of the "American schoolgirl" wearing a miniskirt and white blouse. The three-dimensionality is established.
In the process, Corinne Fhima models a second relief TWITT PARADISE inspired by the blue bird chirping from the Twitter company (5). But for the artist, the bird is not a logo, it is the critical reflection of a society in overconsumption in all areas, including the invasive one of communication via social networks. The artist gives back to the bird colors and volumes. Even if everything is synthetic, it sings of heterogeneity. This time, TWITT PARADISE has the appearance of a wall hanging, 280 x 200 x 30 cm, made of flattened jumbo bags, those officially used to store clothes but too often diverted into suitcases by necessity. All compose a sort of cacophony of tricolor or four-color banners. As for the silhouette, it is drawn using sewn ribbons and braids in passementerie. TWITT PARADISE proudly displays its eye made with an inflatable terrestrial globe and its plumage transformed into a multi-season artificial garden where fruits, inflatable musical instruments and a soccer ball flutter with great ease and rebelliousness. There is also a welcome sign, the silhouette of Tweety, Sylvester's friend, wicker and plastic baskets, a butterfly net to catch plastic cans and, right in the middle, a large white hash mark that sets the tone for this pictorial composition with harmonious dissonances. Corinne Fhima has not forgotten her first gesture as a visual artist: painting and sculpting, but with flowers. In this atmosphere of a new exotic world, it is possible to glimpse another nod to the American artist Jeff Koons and his imposing dog sculptures covered with real flowering plants "Puppy" (1992) or "Split-Rocker" (2000). Like the artist and her plants intended to wither on the works, Corinne Fhima plays the mischievous game by using only cheap materials to create works that are just as perishable since they are degradable.
Corinne Fhima is "at ease" in her artistic shifts, masters both meaning and composition, and she has demonstrated this to us since she began developing her works by transforming any material into a medium and gleaning all sources of inspiration without prejudice. This is how, since 2021, the field of sport has become part of her playing field. Eve wears all kinds of jerseys and shorts to dress EVE LOVE SPORT in this merciless universe where the exaltation of bodies, players and supporters, but also the unlimited commercialization of all logos on all media, mingle. The artist launches her new collection and we find Eve in a "condolence head" in a vacuum-packed tray, always sublimated on tarpaulin, sewn and padded, as a footballer or basketball player but always wearing the famous pink housewife gloves and stiletto heeled boots or pumps. The artist happily crosses the line and produces a series of works of art, in its rawest expression, where it becomes the logo, indifferently plastered on any collector's item to satisfy aficionados of round or oval balls.
In Corinne Fhima's work, the use and representation of her body as a model, an object, vacuum-packed meat, as a not-so-usual food function, the exposure of her flesh that slips outside the rules of decorum but always controlled, can heighten excitement, fantasy in front of a consumable body. It is obvious that certain reluctance to the unknown, to emptiness, to non-knowledge or even ignorance cannot be ignored, because in the artist's work, the carnal is serious but uninhibited, certainly a little libertine and raw but that is what gives it life. This is reminiscent of certain works in our Western art history where the body, in the most lascivious attitudes, displayed a provocative and humid sensuality and could arouse emotions or agitations or even rejections. Between 1607 and 1608, the "Susan and the Elders" painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) has this flesh and blood embodied without vulgarity! In 1654, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) painted "Bathsheba Bathing Holding King David's Letter" without any modesty except for a decorous restraint with the letter she holds in her right hand. Later in 1866, in a cruder and more humid composition, Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) immerses us in "The Origin of the World." Between 1875 and 1877, Auguste Rodin created "The Age of Bronze" and succeeded in sculpting, in plaster and then in bronze, the lascivious and abandoned nudity of a young man, the model Auguste Neyt, who was captured in the same pose and probably in the master's studio, by the photographer Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-1885). Later in 1907, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) made us forget with his "Demoiselles d'Avignon", through this cubist modernity, the bodies of naked women in lascivious and seductive poses. In 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe (1948-1989) immortalized on silver paper "Man in Polyester Suit", an ultra-sexual black body sublimated by a tactile rendering of the skin as well as the synthetic suit. And even in a variety song "Striptease" (1979), the Quebec singer Diane Dufresne succeeds in the ultra erotic interpretation of the work composed by Luc Plamondon (music) and Germain Gauthier (lyrics): "Give me your fantasies, so that I can exorcise them - My hands caress my breasts - As you would do so well - I feel a shiver that seizes you - It's crazy, it's crazy." The vocal and the sensual slip into eroticism and play on the licentious as Corinne Fhima enjoys pictorial libertinism.
Corinne Fhima thus demonstrates in her work that art must contain the unshakeable notion of freedom where the artistic flourishes in rigor and slippages, the same ones always controlled in a very relative instinct since generated by our knowledge nourished by learning, knowledge and experiences. The artist's work reveals itself in such a natural way that we must accept it in order to discover her words which materialize in a singular way by a critical and constructive reflection on art and its artistic movements by including the materials, the materials and the diverted objects. As an artist guiding her work, she plays freely with the means of expressing her work which are painting, sculpture, photography, sewing and performance.
Yves Sabourin
curator - artistic director - author - speaker - consultant
Honorary Inspector of Artistic Creation at the Ministry of Culture
(1) Aristide Bruant (1851-1925) songwriter and author of the song “Nini peau de chien” published in 1895.
(2) Benetton Group, an Italian company founded in 1965 in the field of fashion and clothing.
(3) Tallit: a four-cornered garment, like a shawl, specific to Judaism, with black bands and fringes.
(4) American anthem “The star-spangled banner”. Composer, author, poem written by Francis Scott Key in 1814.
(5) Twitter, an American company founded on March 21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass.