ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

« Thinning factor »
20th june -28th july 2007

To each period of the History, to each society corresponds an ideal appearance. In West, the current polemic attempts to denounce the rules of beauty conveyed by the world of fashion, or of show business.
In her new project Olga Tobreluts has chosen to present a track of reflection from which the spectator is free to find or not an answer to the eternal question: Does the ideal beauty exist?
A perpetual fight remains between the ideal of the right form, created artificially by the Man, and the plastic rounded, undulated, irregular, granular, undulating, and specific to the natural world. This impact between civilization and nature creates thus chaos, confusion.

If one observes the evolution of the feminine silhouette in the History, one notices a very important influence of the environment and social organization on the formation of the aesthetic ideals. The representation that we have today of the woman is in perfect contradiction with what it could be at the 17th century for example. The thinness was a sign of disease, of physical weakness, while to be round was a sign of good health and fertility. Later, in the 19th century, the use of the corset enabled the woman to control her body. The body is not then any more one object which nature works, but becomes the victim of what the society imposes to him.
While virtual bodies proliferate, while the border between mechanics and the organics subside, while one steps up the programming of the species and the replication of the individual, it is more than ever necessary to test the limit of the human one: “Is my body still my body?”
Nowadays Humanity passes the greatest part of its life in a city between skyscrapers which tend to lengthen rather than to widen, the saving of space becomes dominating, the rhythm of the life is unrestrained; the rationalization became the catchword of our society. Rationalization which one also finds in the image of the body conveyed by the world of fashion, where woman becomes an androgynous person.

The two principal series of the exhibition "Thinning factors" are based on images of contemporary sexual idols. Olga Tobreluts makes the choice to mingle these representations with sculptures of ancient goddesses, in a way so that each face has an other body incarnation, contrary with the modern rules. It results from this obvious illustrations of a nonsense tending to limit the forms in the design of the ideal proportions of the female body.
At the same time, the exhibition enables the spectator to consider the unexplainable inversion according to the perception of the thinness - pushed deliberately until the foolish by the artist - deprived of individuality and yet still so tempting.
The assertion according to which the eternal youth is today always extremely attracting is particularly current in the series where ancient bodies raise faces of actresses and fashion models known of all, such as Kate Moss, Keira Knightley, or Angelina Jolie.

Also, is a free choice, independent of the aesthetic and social stereotypes possible today? Without claiming to answer it, the intention of the exhibition is to test the aesthetic references suitable for each one.