Voyeurism.

Voyeurism, exhibitionism, transgression and the dynamics of the eroticized gaze were among the issues raised at this probing two-person show. For her part, Ariane Lopez-Huici propounded a pair of recent projects: TOAK, a silent, tightly framed videotaped dance that was intensely, on the same level fiercely, performed by the artist, and Aviva, a series of photographs picturing a majestically obese stark naked woman whose monumental presence call ups the Venus of Willendorf and other cthonic, matriarchal deities. Lopez-Huici's video and photographs were correlativeed by Michel Auder's video (shot in 1976 re-edited in 1994) also in black and white, of the late Hannah Wilke.

The mix of still and moving images created a sexually charged atmosphere in which, individual couldn't help noticing, the protagonists refused to engage the viewer's watch Yet despite the lack of notice contact with the camera, Hannah Wilke showed herself conscious of its gaze. She plays to the camera, to Auder's (male) regard and to the viewer as she performs a deliberate seductive and ironic strip tease, using, among other accessories, a statue of an androgynous child (Amor?) as a foil.

In contrast to Auder's piece, Lopez-Huici, in her black-and-white videotape (shot on Chrystel Egal), tums the camera onward herself in an act of auto-voyeurism. Assuming the part of an anxiously frenzied maenad or martyr, she is filmed hurling herself against an unyielding, standing metal chisel (Although not identified, it is by way of Alain Kirili.) The vulnerable muscle and fat of her naked body is pitted against the cutting, adamant material. She clings to her priapic antagonist, twists and weaves about it, rejecting and resuming to the carved work again and again in a following of abrupt, angular, exposed motions Throughout, Lopez-Huici's attention is obsessively center upon herself and her relationship with this metallic surrogate other. She spars with the chisel in an agon wrapped in harsh, dramatic shadows, jagged transitions in lighting and grainy film fabrics whose broken rhythms flicker with gravitys of unlikely grace. Desire here is frett ardent, challenging, seeking.

The Aviva portraits, onward the other hand, are virtually flawless, the lights and darks finely modulated and balanced. The artist has plant off the model's abundant, fat folds--the weighty breasts and stomach, the heavy thighs--in an elegant juxtaposition of lights and darks, her generous forms made buoyant, lithe, displayed with candor on the other hand also appreciation. Erect, her face averted, her sex strategically veiled in darkness, she is framed at the softness of cloth as a backdrop. onward the floor, the fabric falls into a star pattern in the middle of which Aviva stands, self-satisfied and self-sustaining. Lopez-Huici has assembled an ambiguous ars erotica further one in which the visible form [i]or[/i] frame as a vehicle for narrative and metaphor, acknowledges us something of desire, power and self-knowledge.

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