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.

–Text by Séverine Fromaigeat