Florence Paradeis/Carmen Navarrete: Fundacio "La Caixa." (art exhibit)

"Mirados y vi(ver)siones" [Gazes and vi(ver)sions], an exhibition of work by Florence Paradeis and Carmen Navarrete, was part of a series of exhibitions engaging contemporary feminist discourse entitled "Tejido inacabado" (Unfinished fabric). Each of these shows attempts to set up a dialogue between the work of two women artists.

Paradeis, a French artist, exhibited a group of photographs that she had glued onto aluminum and laminated. One of these was a diptych entitled So you know this woman?, 1995, which depicted two views of the same scene, an apparently mundane perspective on a city street, except for one detail: on the extreme right of each you could see a "Wanted for Murder" poster attached to a post. In the second image, a woman stared at this poster, and the direction of her gaze heightened the viewer's awareness of the carelessly handmade quality of the sign - atypical for a poster generated by the police - a sign describing the recent strangulation of a woman whose identity remained undisclosed.

Paradeis' other photos contained female protagonists as well. In the first half of one work a young woman, apparently absorbed in thought, eats spaghetti, while in the second half she pours wine into the glass of a dinner companion who is trying to retrieve a fork from beneath the table. While these scenes are unsettling, almost cold, they amount to a rather banal depiction of the lack of communication between two people. The slices of life that Paradeis presents are so devoid of context that provocative images remain largely unexplicated.

In Navarrete's installation entitled La bella indiferencia (Beautiful indifference, 1996), on the other hand, oversized slides were projected onto the walls of a darkened space. The images in the slides had been shot from photographs of hysterical patients in the Salpetriere, the famous site of Freud's and Charcot's research into hysteria. Into the wall on which the projections appeared the artist had cut four peepholes through which one could view various scenes of hysterical women. At the same time, one heard the sound of three tape-recorded voices: a woman reading historical data on hysteria; a teenage girl playing the alter ego of Freud's Dora; and a man expounding at length on medical photography. As one listened to these voices one became immersed in the images - a sensation only heightened by the noise of the changing slides, which pounded above one's back, becoming louder as one approached the peepholes, as if the images were intended to serve more as a whip to one's conscience than something to be looked at.

The importance of listening was reiterated in a sign that Navarrete placed in a Barcelona street. "Your body should be heard" was written in the center of two fragmented images - a close-up of the eyes of one of Charcot's patients above, and, below, a depiction of female anatomy - reasserting control over the female body more through language than through representations of the body. In La bella indiferencia, Navarrete deconstructed the stereotype of hysteria as the archetypal female illness, in order to endow it with other transformative properties. Her art - a group of ideas that straddle reality and fiction - formed the more lucid portion of "Mirados y vi(ver)siones."

- Juan Vicente Aliaga

Translated from the Spanish by Vincent Martin.