Nearly eighty women give you a truth revealed after facing themselves for eight hours straight. Their materials were simple: a spotlight, a canvas stapled to a wooden frame, several brushes, a little turpentine and six sticks of paint. Holding the gaze is a complex act.
Measuring the proportions of a face that becomes tired as the hours go by and discovers the importance of slow time, of silence, of finding the strength to assume who she really is, is hard work.
These women are authors and objects of representation.
Their stillness belongs to them. So does their flesh and their capacity for surrender. They do with them and with their image what they want to do, and they break the mechanisms that activate the dramas of power. There is no complacency or mercy here. Only fortitude. They have come into the world to put mirrors. To share processes. To build themselves also from the collective.
That’s why there are no cartouches either: the work is one.
A single woman holds your gaze.
Paula Bonet.
