I feed my dreams slime at night: March 16 to May 6 in Geneva / March 23 to May 20 in Lausanne

PRESS RELEASE

Fabienne Levy is thrilled to present for its first exhibition in Geneva new works by Swiss artist Vanessa Safavi. This exhibition will be held simultaneously in the two galleries in Lausanne and Geneva.

The pieces presented speak with both humour and gravity about the importance of our bodies and their shapes. Issues of gender, race and sexuality confront the established norms of physicality.

It is within this context that Vanessa challenges our preconceived notions of identity and body aesthetics. Her works can be provocative, sensual, abstract or simply disturbing. Overall, they are an invitation to reflect on our own identity and the way we see each other.

These works point out the reality of our own bodies, they remind us that they are much more than just physical vessels, they are also mirrors of our own history, culture and identity.

Born in Lausanne, Vanessa Safavi studied at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL) where she obtained her diploma in visual arts in 2007. In 2018, she resumed her studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), obtaining a master's degree in 2020. Her work was presented at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Glarus for a first major solo exhibition (2011), followed by monographic presentations in Altkirch, Paris and Basel (2012), São Paulo (2014), Bentheim (2016) and Freiburg (2019). Awarded the Prix Illy in 2012 and the Prix Irène Raymond in 2019, her work is regularly shown in galleries in Berlin, Brussels, Athens, London and Zurich. Numerous artistic residencies will punctuate her career, taking her from Paris to Cape Town, from Johannesburg to New York, from Peru to Heiligenberg, or even to Rome in 2021.

Text by Séverine Fromaigeat

Séverine Fromaigeat is an art historian, art critic and curator at Museum Tinguely, Basel. She has curated major exhibitions including “60 Years of Performance Art in Switzerland” (2017), “Too early to panic” (2018) and “Cyprien Gaillard”. “Roots Canal” (2019). She was previously curator for the Pictet Art Collection, and worked for the MAMCO (Museum of Contemporary Art Geneva). She founded the art space Zabriskie Point in Geneva.

Iridescent materials, glittery floors, sensual shapes and textures: for her double exhibition at the Fabienne Levy Gallery in Geneva and Lausanne, Vanessa Safavi (*1980) has created a universe that is as delicious as it is facetiously ambiguous. She lures us into a world on the edge of the candy shop, with its pop and tasty colours, and the erotic store, with its undeniably sexual forms. Each piece, each object presented seems to draw us into the sulphurous web of an immediate seduction to better evoke, with a mixture of depth and playfulness, the representation of the body, the symbolism of gender as well as a history of forms.

The artist stretches her plastic reflections around the medium of sculpture, exploring alternatively bronze, glass and silicone. This sensual material, whose skin-like texture allows her to play with different connotations related to the human body, is the one with which the artist is most familiar, as she has been experimenting with its physical and symbolic possibilities for many years. Hanging on walls or on their immaculate pedestals, spheres, cubes and rectangular parallelepipeds are dressed in bright and luminous chromatics - with fluorescent and pop colours, in yellow, pink or even bright green, as if to defy the effect of seriousness induced by the vocabulary of geometric motifs (the VACUUM SERIES,2022-2023). The contours become rounder, even softer, and intertwined rubbery cords are sometimes layered over the objects. The apparent simple forms become serpentine, childlike and out of place. Are they retro-futuristic functional objects out of a sci-fi story? Erotic toys with a yet to be determined use? Between the aesthetic heritage of the heroic and geometric minimalism of the 1960s and the joyful exuberance of the Italian design of Ettore Sottsass, Vanessa Safavi crosses references and adds a delightful fantasy to her formal vocabulary. She plays with the elastic properties of silicone, its gravity-induced bending, its irregular surface and its flexible angles. In addition, the artist employs a plastic used in the manufacture of sex toys and erotic dolls, further enhancing the tactile and sensual dimension of her sculptures.

From her residency at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 2021-2022, the artist has returned with new iconographic sources and two fascinating materials - bronze and glass - with which she created new forms. An alloy of copper and tin, noble and imposing, complex and full of history, bronze requires a very different kind of expertise from plastics and silicones. In Lausanne, nestled like two eggs in the hollow of a tangle of black and rubbery cords of different thicknesses are two rounded charcoal-coloured forms ((Self-)Portrait of a Lady in Petroleum (Sticky, Heavy, Gloomy), 2023).The outline of a breast can be seen on one side, which on the other ends in a point, in an oscillation between several motifs, a drop, a female attribute, organic elements. This game of correspondences between the mineral, the animal and the vegetable is reminiscent of Jean Arp's sculptures and their combination of different images, mixed with a touch of humour. The feminine element of the breast and the contrast of materials also evoke the surrealist works of Meret Oppenheim, which function on the principle of the interweaving of antagonistic realities and the unusual, even fantastic, meeting of heterogeneous universes.

In Vanessa Safavi's work, behind these drop-shaped breasts, which elsewhere have a golden patina (Celestial Bombs, 2022) or iridescent rainbow shades (Rockets in the Milky Way, 2022), lies the fabulous story of Diana or Artemis of Ephesus, goddess of nature but also of fertility, often associated with birth, protector of women during childbirth, but also, paradoxically, a symbol of castration. Represented since Antiquity with a bust covered with numerous protuberances which were interpreted as being alternately nipples, testicles, eggs or even leather bags with magical properties, a mythological and protective aura infuses Vanessa Safavi's sculptures.

This research into female and male attributes has given rise to a brand new series of three completely extravagant sculptures: cylinders of translucent glass whose ends end in huge penises intertwine to form improbable, wild and lively bouquets. In neon yellow (Tales of Creation, Tales of Transformation, 2022), sparkling pink (Tricks and Conflicts, 2023) or transparent purple (Tales of Ignorance, Tales of Evidence, 2023), these works play on the ambivalence of an attraction-repulsion. The artist is inspired here by the iconography of the goddess Medusa from Greek mythology, whose hair takes the form of swarming venomous snakes and whose gaze has the power to turn anyone into stone. Initially considered monstrous, Medusa gradually became an archetype of the femme fatale, then a symbol of power claimed by the feminist movement. Her figure and her story are the source of stories about our relationship with the monstrous, the power of the feminine and the fear of castration, allusions that can be found in the sculptures of Vanessa Safavi.

The body, its metamorphoses and artifices, its extensions and imitations, its powers and symbolism, is the cardinal point to which the artist's new works are tied. In her hands, materials are as varied and versatile as glass, bronze and silicone become fabulous storytellers and masterful interpreters of this reinvented, hybrid, fragmented or magnified body. By focusing on the intimate parts of the male and female anatomy, Vanessa Safavi presents with a touch of irony the games of power and seduction between the sexes, the ambivalence of their relationship. With eloquence and delicacy, her works offer a plastic response to current societal and cultural discourses.