Claire Dantzer

Claire Dantzer often works on the ambivalence of feelings, on the way desire topples over into disgust, and on the porousness which links repulsion to desire. She installs her work in the place where opposites are joined, where certainties crumble, leaving the spectator facing a troubling indecisiveness. Her subjects are often chosen for their capacity to stir up a meaningful feeling in a split second. Be it through greed (the desire to stuff oneself to bursting with a wall of chocolate, or a cake weighing 1000 lbs.), curiosity (the desire to peer into the faces of those people who have devoured other people, trying to find therein what, precisely, is inhuman about them), compassion (the desire to save this girl in her underclothes and rabbit's ears who is forever falling into the cream cake), nausea, violence... the spectator is singled out, challenged, and jostled. Her oeuvre plays with the after-the-fact, it is consumed in the latter (the form is direct, and inciting, then imposes (often too late) a kind of return to reason. Through elegant pieces which are only innocent in appearance, Claire Dantzer plays with excess and questions our capacity to withstand the immediacy of our impulses.