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| Butz&Fouque |
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For L.F.D.A. 02.In this new series of photographs, entitled Lovely and created in winter 2008, the Lille-based duo present their personal, witty, ironic take on the world of cabaret and variety. The brilliantly-coloured decor featured in the nine large-format photographs is devised and constructed like a stage set, inhabited by false twins who exhibit themselves in a series of strictly-codified postures. Butz&Fouque draw on the worlds of cabaret, the circus and carnivals to present a hybrid female figure, part 1920s pin-up, part asexual, airbrushed top model from the couture catwalks and glossy magazines of today. The seductive, fantasy quality of their disguised, artificially-staged bodies and postures is undermined by their nudity which, in this highly artificial context, becomes profoundly, disturbingly ambiguous and neutral. Butz&Fouque’s work takes its visual inspiration from the history of art, and the cinema (Diego Velasquez, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Peter Greenaway, etc.). The duo challenges fixed perceptions and uses of the human body, as seen in the worlds of fashion and advertising. Faced with these anonymous bodies, posing silently before us, deceptively provocative, erotic yet strangely mannered and burlesque, we are encouraged, inevitably, to question the nature of desire. What promises of delight do these female figures hope to convey with their fixed, glazed smiles, on our stages and screens ? Who is this two-fold woman, constantly changing her appearance and hair colour, yet always remaining the same ? [V.Th.] Butz&FouqueButz & Fouque is an artistic duo trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dunkerque. The two artists have worked together since 2003. In their photos, videos, performances and installations, the two young women take place in aesthetically attractive settings, taking symmetrical poses. The ambiguous eroticism of their bodies, double or hybrid, their false twinness, are so many techniques for a mise en abyme of the question of multiple identity, at the heart of their artistic approach.[V. Th.] Butz was born in Strasbourg in 1981 and Fouque was born in Saint-Omer in 1978.
 Butz&Fouque
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