Ceysson & Bénétière

ORLAN: this is my body… This is my software… 

There are landmark exhibitions you need to see for yourself. The one Ceysson & Bénétière are dedicating to ORLAN in their vast Koerich space is undoubtedly one of those. Although it is not a complete retrospective show, it gives visitors an overview of ORLAN’s creations over six decades. The artist’s work is so varied that, despite the immensity of the space, the gallery had to make a drastic selection of the works featured. The resulting exhibition does justice to the great formal diversity of an artist who has never ceased to renew herself and be a true creator since the beginning of her career, as well as to the extreme coherence of her work. The iconic works that serve as ORLAN’s international business card -here we cannot but think of her two most famous performances and series of works, the Baiser de l’artiste from 1977, and her various surgical series from the early 90s – by no means exhaust her entire body of works, which kept expanding over time and gave way to an incredibly rich corpus.  

It all began with the astounding and premonitory piece entitled ORLAN accouche d’elle m’aime. In 1964, while she was only a 16 or 17-year-old teenager (and we should recall that the majority was 21 years old in France at the time), the young girl was already fully in charge of her own life as an artist and a woman. Incredibly precociously, ORLAN took control of her own destiny and placed the body, her own body, at the center of her work in a sort of manifesto gesture. While her fate as a woman called, even summoned her, to give birth, ORLAN rebelled against her female condition and literally escaped the frame that was supposed to enclose her body. Her womb would only give birth to works of art and to an artist whose production has been in constant transformation since then. To the finitude of childbirth, which imposes limitations and constraints on women, ORLAN opposed the boundlessness of creation. The body, no longer endured but appropriated, could become a work of art in itself or give birth to it, as shown in her fascinating body-sculpture series. Whether it is through her reinterpretation of baroque, or later, through her plastic surgeries and then various self-hybridizations, the artist never stopped using the body, her own body, in her creative process. She turned it into the measure of all things, going as far as to invent her own yardstick, the “ORLAN-body”, which she mobilized for famous performances like MeasuRAGE, in which her body became a template to express the dimensions of the place it was in. 

Exit the female matrix that confined women to a secondary role: let’s make room for the software! The current exhibition will also shed light on ORLAN’s quick adoption of technologies, especially the most innovative ones, with the aim of overcoming the limitations imposed on the female body. It was already the case with her paintings and collages of the 70s, a lesser-known aspect of her production. Women being scarce in the tradition of abstract painting, it is the one ORLAN looked to break into. With a provocative and voracious delight, she chose to paint with…industrial tints! These rarely exhibited paintings are the highlight of this exhibition, along with her original collages, many of which are made out of photocopies. A technology that has become so commonplace today that we have a hard time remembering what a major technological advance it was when it appeared. ORLAN could only make use of it. Later, photo editing software opened another path the artist followed to embody her work even further. 

Whether we are talking of her pre-Columbian, African, or, recently, Mayan Self-Hydridations, or of her Picasso-inspired les Femmes qui pleurent sont en colère series, a large part of ORLAN’s work would not have seen the light without the help of new technologies. In nearly 60 years of career, the artist never stopped thinking and working around the body which use and representation have become indistinguishable from technological and scientific progress. 

There are landmark exhibitions you need to see for yourself. The one presented between those walls is a masterful unveiling of ORLAN’s work. This is her body… this is her software… 

Alain Quemin 

University Professor

Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France & the International Art Critic Association 

Ceysson & Bénétière