French Curves

Curated by Jeanine Woollard and Sarah Glenny

Art Pavilion, Mile End. November 2006.

French Curves: The Minimalists Vs the Contemporary Baroque: National stereotypes and aesthetics.

Roger Clarke, Stephanie Douet, Danielle Drainey, Sarah Glenny, Caitlin Massley, Ian McHugh, Nicole Mollett, Charlotte Moth, Cathy Wade, Jonathan Willett, Jeanine Woollard

Why is French sexy?

Why are curves French?

“For a long time, as the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it… Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, hypocritical sexuality.”  Michel Foucault                   

Why does the adjective “French” always carry a connotation of enjoyment, recreation and pleasure? Why, for the British, is a trip to Paris thought of as romantic? A Frenchman writing on the Western tradition as a whole, Foucault suggests the systems of repression in Victorian society, though qualities which typify Britishness, were actually a pervasive phenomenon throughout the West.

French Curves is an exhibition organised around the particular hybrid of the geometrical and the sexual in a draughtsman’s stencil, a tool used to control the hand and the line it produces, yet one that refuses the repressive straight line. It creates a line with connotations of flourish and enjoyment, its feminine curve bearing the loaded signifier of Frenchness and all its implicit trimmings of excess and sexiness.

French Curves takes the perceived dichotomy of French/British as a starting point from which to question and elaborate on the paradox of an object at once utilitarian in its use for repetition and precision, and subversive in that its name denies strict, unadorned geometry with implications of the feminine, the ornamented, the grotesque and the extravagant.

The show aims to explore wildly differing interpretations of the French curve, by contrasting two sets of aesthetics head to head – the abstract and geometric, and the flamboyant, the rococo, and the literary. It asks if the idea of sexy, sophisticated Frenchness serves to counter the repressed sexuality of the British and whether this refusal of repression gives rise to creativity and fantasy.

As national identity becomes evermore difficult to define the show seeks to playfully examine the clichés of national stereotyping through a hyper-traditional sense of aesthetic boundaries. 

For further information only, email sarahglenny@aol.com