As designer, Love Curly worked mainly in the fashion industry when she still lived in Ukraine. For brands, she draws patterns, she imagines collections, their colors and shapes. This is what you can immediately see in her drawings, a complete clothing. It is also for this reason that some of her works are composed as trompe l'oeil. Indeed, the artist recurrently summons animal forms or insects, such as the butterfly, or the ladybug. The large eyes - which connote a disturbing strangeness as well as a shameless joy - that can be found from one drawing to the next are reminiscent of the ocelli, the patterns that appear on the wings of butterflies. Like big eyes, they imitate their predators in order to protect themselves. A parade of survival that could echo here the first utility of a garment, conceived at first to protect us, before creating us an identity of any piece. A second skin.
This is how the drawings are arranged in the space. Like a second skin for this artist in exile, forced into political and social destitution. It is in these bright colors and ambivalent forms that she finds protection. They reflect her reality: a condition prey to a political and current reality, from which it is then difficult to escape without being identified with it. The drawing allows Love Curly to protect herself as well as to assert herself through this new reality. Based mainly on her emotions, her drawings allow her to keep a connection with the rest of the world despite the violence that constitutes it.
If the pastel and the tones used for the drawing provoke an immediate softness, there is nevertheless a certain violence hidden in it. Quite organic and powerful, the eroticism that emerges from Love Curly's work highlights both the noise and the silence that punctuate our time. The artist is tempted to soften reality but is just as keen to provoke the gaze, through her collages and a surrealist borrowing, on the violence that runs through her life. It is this tension that creates the work.
Indeed, Love Curly's work proceeds like a therapy, to the care and the surpassing of oneself. Gathered at Strouk gallery, thus in the same place big enough to welcome them for the first time since the artist's exile, they are for her in this space like a house in which she invites us to share this reality under tension. Thus, she takes possession of the gallery, in which she feels safe, surrounded by her dreams that shoot between limbo and reality.
Chloé Bonnie More.
