Articles

Maryline Pierre Yves

Par  Natacha DEIFTS

Maryline M’Gaïdes est une artiste plasticienne née à Bône, Skikda en Algérie en 1965. Elle a étudié à l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de la Villa Arson, école d’art contemporain à Nice.

Elle vit aujourd’hui à Tel Aviv. Elle est également professeure de Tai chi qi gong.

 Street art, peinture, sculpture, photographie, Maryline M’Gaïdes est une touche à tout. Elle a étudié la calligraphie chinoise et japonaise.

 Par son travail, Maryline M’Gaïdes stigmatise les notions de genre en interrogeant les limites du féminin et du masculin. Elle questionne l’idée du genre comme une performance en soi et la traduit en photographie ou en vidéo. Elle se met en scène, se travestit et conçoit un nouveau personnage nommé « Pierre-Yves ». Elle cherche à créer le doute en poussant le regardeur à se questionner sur son propre genre et sur la distinction qu’il élabore entre le sexe extérieur et biologique et « le genre intérieur ».

 En sculpture, elle utilise principalement des matières naturelles, bois, terre, argile. Elle interpelle encore le spectateur qui d’un regard, se laisse emporter dans cet univers étrange et dérangeant. Les gestes de ponçage, lustrage, tournage de la terre ne sont pas anodins : ils évoquent le contact, les frictions, l’intimité. L’espace érotique créé est une invitation aux fantasmes par la « phallocratisation » des objets comme un jeu. Une façon de sculpter qui est inhérente à ce jeu érotique fait pour ébranler l’attirance esthétique des formes.

 Suite à la révélation tardive d’un lourd secret de famille et d’un drame familial survenu dans l’enfance, Maryline M’Gaïdes s’est libérée et son art pictural s’en ressent. Si le noir était dominant dans ses créations artistiques, place aujourd’hui aux couleurs chatoyantes et vives : rouge, jaune, violet pour notre plus grand plaisir.

Formal Reversibility and Anatomical Confusion

Par Monique Boghanim

Erotica and Minimalism

Her Jardins Erotiques (1&2) are installations associating diverse media (wood, soil, ceramic, synthetic fur, plaster…) and heterogenous objects (bottles, vibrator motor, belt, leash…). They constitute the staging of a world of fantasy. In this world, the spectator may go around listening to Fais-moi mal Johnny, Magali Noel’s destroy song. The masculine and feminine sexual references, the full/empty, soft/hard, mass/form references juxtapose for a critic of the « anatomical destiny » of mankind, which passes by invention of new forms and uses to unique materials. One can find undetermined sculptures, summary of all possible rela- tionships between a man and a woman. Cylindrical and empty forms in the center proudly spring up in an evocation of the straightness phallic and the emptiness of the vaginal duct at the same time. Another one speaks of the lover and mother felinity: Fais-moi mal Johnny is a pipe in spirals surrounded by synthetic fur. It draws in the space a tube, simple and obvious metaphor of the vagina, location of sexual pleasure and childbirth. The hair, used first by Meret Oppenheim in the Déjeuner en fourrure in 1936, suggests the pubic hair. The tipped chaise traire looks like a fetish object from a sadomasochism game. La Phallocrati- sation is iS wood carved like a penis and prosaically tied in a fagot.

Collection is a set of small turned phallic sculptures and laid on graceful wood structure. Subtil dosage of provocation and refinement, one may imply two interpretations either a phallus or a sex toy: Dominant female’s castration or a blink to solitary female pleasure.

The purism and the exquisiteness of these evocative objects, in ceramic or clay, imply a loss of virility of the man’s sex, while detecting its fragility. One thinks of Fillette by Louise Bourgeois photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. There, the penis, although of giant dimension, is tenderly carried by the artist. This is not a downgrading of the virility’s func- tions but rather a affectionate delectation of masculine vulnerability.

Furthermore, the clay sculptures implicitly invoke, less by their form than suggestion of he a manual gesture clutching the mass in a rotation. Finally, the smooth aspect, irremediably tactile and their minimalism, bring them close of the ones of Constantin Brancusi.

Sex and Genre In the video-performance Passage, Maryline M’ gaides films slowly herself, searching her own identity. She « painted » a black beard on her chin, symbol of virility. Her hair was held in the back, eliminating any feminine element from this auto-portrait. Transformed into a man, the video shows her metamorphosis backward. The beard is removed using a cotton round, hair is liberated, eyes have make up and the lips are glossed. The artiste take back her female identity of Maryline.
When she Voluntarily adopts male codes in physical appearance, she overtly transgresses the prescribed codes for her sex and a clear message to society. Going back and forth between two genres says all on her iden- to their own predetermined
tity search, the refusal of any taxonomy, which sends each sex world.

In another work, Tour de France, she completely dresses as a cyclist. Then, he/she ostensi- bly takes the improbable bicycle. For a sportive performance? To run away? To discover another world? Or show us not without humor the kind of silly costume worn by sports men, evocative of virile power and the effort to provide.

In Art, the intervention of masculine or feminine can translate in varied combina- tions calling for hybridization or reversal of the body parts like in Hans Bellmer, Cindy Sherman, Miro, Magritte. But for all these games and interventions, the travesty is approach of the totally radical change, the ultimate synthesis of two genres. Marcel Duchamp1 in this field a precursor. If the travesty is often from man to women, for the last few years the opposite movement can be observed. By wearing a costume, Maryline M’ gaides only hope to scramble the cards, changing roles, going from one identity to the next to visualize their similarities and differences. On a black and white auto-portrait, she adopts men’ codes (Lea- ther jacket, emerging beard, short hair and thick eyebrows) to create her alter ego. Reduced identity to traditional images, culturally admitted to reach the man
the clichés, the female and male archetypes, which show the artist. Through the masks’ game, the mise-en-scène of herself, she uses « lies to reach truth » (Pi- casso). I is someone else. Creating hiatus between biological sex and claimed identity, other than the one we have since birth. This is the question of sex and genre, leading to its complete denaturalization. In another portrait, the secondary signs show less: hair is attached in the back. the chin is smooth, and the black shirt and jacket are neutral. She invests at the same time male and female fields to create a third sex: The androgynous, where the difference erased or out of place. This portrait of the artist, who stares at the spectator, gives the importance of internal search. This introspection ques- tions now the watcher. Maryline M’ gaides wanders between two sets of contradictory images: The one shown and the update of all want to remain hidden. This is why, she has a tendency to disturb while exploring : world held as subversive. Her work so physically explicit and psychologically ambiguous belongs to this contemporary art that today continues to strike the public’s eye. She belongs to this generation, and that wants to destabilize traditional polarities of male and female, implemen- ting ethic configurations located beyond the sexual difference and who is radi- cally distinguished of the identity positions of the 70’s. Somewhere else, Maryline M’ gaides’ inspiration, complex and polymorph artist, turned towards the Orient (Tai chi calligraphies). Her ink fingerprints require internal peace, recovered for an instant.