Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects. Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn

Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects.

Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn

Curator : ALBERTINE DE GALBERT

PILAR ALBARRACÍN (Spain) . GILLES BARBIER (France) . FREDI CASCO (Paraguay) MARINA DE CARO (Argentina) . MATÍAS DUVILLE (Argentina) . ANA GALLARDO (Argentina) JUAN FERNANDO HERRÁN (Colombia) . MARTIN KERSELS (USA). HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA (Brazil) PAULINA SILVA HAUYÓN (Chili) & WALTER ANDRADE (Argentina) . VIRGINIE YASSEF (France) Paulina Silva Hauyón & Walter Andrade Henrique Oliveira Matías Duville

“Try a little tenderness!” as the song goes, like an invitation to sink into the well-padded recesses of a grandmother’s old armchair. Tenderness is one of the strongest components of human nature. It is neither sentimentality nor mushiness, yet its suggestion alone often triggers excesses of modesty or cynicism, the intensity of which clearly indicates that it is an essential emotion that touches our innermost core. Often denigrated and considered as the prerogative of children, old people and women — in short the weak, tenderness is nevertheless a great source of resilience in the face of violence carried out against body and mind.

In a lecture entitled “The Hollow of the Palm and Infrared Love,” the psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Klein. offered a definition of the term by default: “Tenderness is neither possession, nor submission — which objectify — nor passion, nor addiction —which amputate and merge fractions of subjects.” According to him, the subtlety in tenderness resides in the “right distance,” very slight but not nil, which separates two free subjects connected to one another..

Articulated around the notion of the “right distance,” this exhibition questions our connection to the edge, physical limits and otherness. At times rubbed raw or overwhelmed, as when an image, gesture, or word become unhinged and invasive, this limit shifts, whether one is the victim or the author of this shift.

It is the crossing of that tenuous limit between tenderness and the obscene that is at work in Spanish artist Pilar Albarracín’s video La Cabra, in which the artist dances with a goatskin sack of wine that slowly colors her folk costume blood red.

The embrace and the separation of bodies are also the subjects of the Californian artist Martin Kersels’ photographs entitled Tossing a Friend, which literally illustrates a brutal distancing of the artist’s body and the body of Melinda, his ex-partner. Conversely, with Posición Horizontal, a work by Colombian artist Juan Fernando Herrán, the other is not distanced but rather contained, assimilated. The series of nesting beds, each one fitting into another like Matryoshka dolls, suggests a mise en abîme of childhood or one’s innermost world, as if they were being placed in a sheltered spot.

Tenderness as protection and consolation runs throughout the work of the Argentinean artist Matías Duville. Coming straight out of his large-format drawings of unreal landscapes, a giant fish hook —of rusted metal and the size of a person —is gently resting on a blanket that brings to mind the same kinds of blankets found lying around in old houses, the simple sight of which is comforting.

Finally videos by Ana Gallardo (Estela) and Virginie Yassef (L’Arbre, in collaboration with Julien Prévieux), along with several other video works, illustrate the fragile space tenderness embodies, between movement and immobility, silence and crying out.

Albertine de Galbert

. Director of Inecat (Institut national d’expression, de création, d’art et de thérapie [National Institute of expression, creation, art and therapy]).

. Patrice van Eersel, “Une soudaine irruption de la tendresse ?” in Le Grand Livre de la Tendresse (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), p. 23.