emiligraziotti réalise des séries faites de photomontages ou de dessins, travaille avec le son, la vidéo, et l’installation. Artiste pluridisciplinaire et multimédia, elle rassemble tous les éléments qui font de sa production un travail autour de la mythologie individuelle et du particularisme féminin. Elle est de ces artistes qui explorent le corps et la psyché apportant la preuve qu’il n’existe pas d’art d’agrément.

Monstres de chair, hybrides, poupées fleurs, sexuées ou hermaphrodites, sont au générique de son œuvre. Véritables oxymores, leur vue nous révulse et nous fascine à la fois.

Florales et viscérales les images de la série Fe-male basculent dans l’univers surréaliste. On pense à Chicken Knickers de Sarah Lucas, on pense à ce fœtus de tatou photographié par Dora Maar, on bascule dans l’inquiétante étrangeté

On est fasciné par la capacité qu’on les artistes à faire émerger de notre monde ce qui existe et qu’on ne voit pas forcément, ce que Baudelaire nommait le monstrueux vraisemblable.

Chaque série est composée de fragments d’anatomie, et plus largement liée au corps. On y repère des plans plus ou moins resserrés, macro ou microscopiques ; des jeux de symétrie, de dédoublement, de démultiplication ; différents principes qui chaque fois transforment l’ordinaire en extraordinaire.

Les mots de la sculpture sonore : MaNon l’Invaginante sont ressassés, créant une mélopée susurrée, à la fois obsédante, harmonieuse et sérielle.

Les éléments patterns des images, des photos, des dessins, et des sculptures se répètent eux aussi, s’imbriquent les uns dans les autres jusqu’à ce qu’il ne soit plus possible de les départager. Ils s’accouplent en fait, jusqu’à donner naissance à de mystérieuses créatures.

Très vite on repère des éléments qui glissent d’une série vers une autre, permettant de mieux suivre le cheminement plastique et intellectuel de l’artiste. C’est le cas de la sculpture en tissus A couple of qui semble apparaître, cette fois-ci dessinée, dans la dernière série Drawing.

Dans cette série des paires de jambes se découpent sur un aplat de couleur blanche, noire ou rose.

Le dessin est linéaire, simplifié, les couleurs réduites, l’espace non défini.

Parfois les jambes sont surmontées d’un buste, lui même surmonté d’une fleur qui fait office de tête, parfois la fleur vient directement sur la paire de jambes, parfois il y a des bras, parfois plusieurs paires de jambes, plusieurs orifices, plusieurs seins...

Bourrelets de chair ou pétales, féminins ou masculins, vides ou pleins, tragiques ou ridicules, grotesques ou enfantins, ces petits corps hybrides et aveugles semblent se déplacer dans un espace sans repères. Ils sont parfois gracieux, voire élégants, parfois maladroits. Ils tombent se roulent et se rattrapent, font de l’équilibre, sont cul par dessus tête, sans tête... et rappellent... la condition humaine.

C.L

Autopsy of a memory veiled

"He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not..."

Who never played this sadistic child game? This game where a flower serve as a transfer to desire, like an act of magic, to know the level of love. Striped, deflowered by the child who looks for himself in his relationship with others, in his sexuality, this flower is violated, then put to death in an act of a scarlet eroticism.

The work of emiligraziotti makes us penetrate into an alarming atmosphere of a resonant and immanent danger. By this color, red, she dives us into it. Still, this is not the red of a fire, the red of a heat, but the one of pain, of blood, of link. The carmine of this artist is an inner red, a red of fury, similar to the ochre found in the tombs of the first men. A magic red, a red of life, confronted to impulses of death.

In her work, a reversal of eroticism occurs, almost surgical. Indeed, if eroticism plays with veil and unveilment, the artist shows us everything or almost. The images that she presents are direct, without detours. Yet, one shouldn't attribute to her work the flat and trite frontality of medical dissection, because the artist plays here with the last veil, the one who hides death. In fact, the eroticism that sustains the work of this artist is situated beyond what is seen. The sexes are neither erotic, neither sexual, because nothing about them is suggested. It is more what they hide – death – that stands mysterious. And the crossing of it would lead to an inescapable death. This is what the work of emiligraziotti tells us about: of this step? That turns into something violable what is veiled.

Her pictures show vulvas under the terrible aspects of a mouth, of a devouring belly eager for what it creates and what fills it. It is an ancient myth that revisits the artist, the one of the 'vulva dentata', of this powerful and destructive, generative and hungry. With the series Horrorschach, we are directly dived into this deep, inconscient red, of an elementary and 'vagining' life. At first sight, sensation of a disturbing scan of deformity. The title recalls the test of Rorschach, of which the artist deceive us with this 'trash' version. Yet, the pictures, like these of the other series, fe-male, fascinates us. Here, there is nothing about pornography, lascivious sensuality. The work of the artist summons us, in these visual anamorphosis, ancient allegories and references linked to power and to fear of this mouth, which the paradox is to be desired by all. We can see also a recall of gore movies, kinds of aliens, creatures of the depths of a foul abyss. It is also in this terms that the question of the 'double' is asked Then, as in a mirror or kaleidoscope, vulvas are duplicated, giving birth to this hybrid form questioning the gender itself. Are we still really in a femininity? The title indicates this splitting: FE and then MALE. We understand this play on words that convokes also the word she-male and makes us think again our psychoanalytic impulsions and deep desires, through double contiguous and strangely symmetric figures. The medium used for these series - photography, is totally adjusted to this mirror games that reminds us the work of Pierre Molinier. It allows as well precision and detail giving to this flesh another life, biologic, independent and worrying. In another series, La separation, the artist multiply six pictures in an imposing series of bleeding and flowing of this blood, of this potential and dead life.

The sex of women as a matrix of this artist's work, as a place of sexual exploration that assigns the whole body. The topic of the being of sex is questioned, the biologic determination becomes troubled. This terrible belly, sometimes bleeding, echoes with this Maupassant novel : “La mere aux monstres”. There are different aspects of sex that are approached: sexually lost between porno and intimate sensuality with the sculpture “hardcorps premiere boum”, the impossible generation, the need and desire that makes this insomniac mouth a being imposing its proper will on the whole body and, at last, sex as a place of bruise.

emiligraziotti is an artist, simply. She modulates video, sound, photographic image, and drawing. There is also something about architecture and sculpture in all her works, and herself titles some of them “resonant sculptures” – 'sculptures sonores', as for her pictures, construction is also present and brings us back to the notion of space by serialization. So it is not surprising to see appearing an ??? that makes the audience / experimenter dive into a red building, with felt walls and sponge entry, the whole thing baked into this primal color. The mechanism created by the artist makes a wink at Joseph Beuy's work, where a piano is locked in a felt room. Here, the pad is red and the room compels the person who would enter to an inner return and a corporal memory. This is one of the artist's questionings - the visceral memory of the body. Through the pieces, she tells us about this organic unconscious of the body, made of sweetness and pain, that marks our reactions facing reality. We are projected into a deep subjectivity which, I think, is not more the artist's than ours, because she appeals to the archetypes of our human substrata.

Then, the sound, photography and recently the drawing are important media by whom the artist's universe states sometimes a sculpture as to dial with all the pieces. The first drawing attempts by the artist were red. Then, with the last drawings, where we can note the influences of Hans Bellemer and the “ technique referentielle de F. Dolto”, it's another creation process that started. This drawings where we can clearly see sweetness don't say less. The stroke frees itself from symmetry but don't eludes the double. The bodies are cut, recomposed, unbalanced. The presence of masculine sex becomes more intense. Drawings like a grammar, an aesthetic and poetic vocabulary. With more lightness than in her photography, emiligraziotti draws like she spins, thinks like she sews. The flowers of her tissue sculpture, A couple of, combines here in varying postures that we can understand sometimes like fettered, sometimes cut into some collided anatomies. This work of drawing and sculpting recalls the stroke of the child. At first, this doll (flower doll / daisy doll) stands as a transferral effigy where the artist can both get away from her own body and touch the memories of the other. Then, like a graphic vocabulary sign, this hybrid doll, between human and vegetable, is subverted even though it is a possible neutral place where to project anguish, pain, fear, perversions. At least, the flower-doll becomes androgynous, phallic, gifted with multiple sexes.

And this red, always, present in the stroke, like a thread. Everything seems to get together, and get mixed. The thread is an important thing in her work, but it has to be taken and understood as a link. Link between works – each one comes from one another, giving birth, inventing themselves. A register of signs coagulates and gives form, building a drawing. The thread, red, link of blood, pathological, psychological, metaphysical. The red of our humanity. If one does not take time to really look, let himself contaminate, get linked, emiligraziotti's does not give itself. Because in spite of the apparent frontality of the images, the artist plays with fringes, borders, sticks to our skin.