Birds with stars, 2017/2018 – Shoes, kitchen tool, comb bike chains, ropes, tulle, metal thread.
Mirror, 2017/2018 – Mirror, razor, tule, plastic, hairclips, metalic thread, ropes
The sink, 2019 – broken Ipad-screen, metalic thread, bike chain, scarf, Ipad, plastic.
Sky night – 2019 – Plastic, drawings with colors pencil, scarf, plastic.
The toilet – 2019 – Iphone screens, Ipad screen, tv-screen, metalic thread, stickers, ropes.
Brush – 2019 – Iphone screens, drawing with colors pencils, make-up, metalic thread, plexiglass, stickers, bag clips.
Brush II – 2019 – Iphone screens, drawing with colors pencils, make-up, metalic thread, plexiglass, stickers, bag clips.
Brush III – 2019 – drawing with colors pencils, broken Ipad screen, metalic thread, plexiglass, stickers, flying compagny packaging.
Towels – 2019 – drawing with colors pencils, broken Ipad screen, metalic thread, plexiglass.
Toilet paper – 2019 – Iphone screens, ropes, clothes, gucci belt, fabric, transparant paper, tule
Pedicure Kit – drawing with colors pencils, ropes, metalic thread, plexiglass.
The jacket – drawing with colors pencils, ropes, metalic thread, plexiglass.
Shoes on carpet – 2018 – drawing with colors pencils, scarfs, metalic thread, plexiglass, wood.
Towels – 2019 – drawing with colors pencils, broken Ipad screen, metalic thread, plexiglass, wood.
Handkerchiefs – 2019 – drawing with colors pencils, broken Ipad screen, metalic thread, plexiglass, wood.
Imperia bathroom – 2019 – drawing with colors pencils, scarf, plastic, thread.
I’m attractive and intelligent, and it pleases me that I’m being watched. And if I happen to tell a lie or two from time to time, it’s only so you don’t paint a bad picture of me. Orhan Pamuk: My name is Red
The bathroom is the first part of a project in the frame of which Anna Solal decided to build a house, or rather its equipment, for someone she doesn’t know. For that, she is using junk of the contemporary culture, objects from one euro shops, industrial parts, different pieces of cheap plastic, broken smartphone screens. Those are, however, very laboriously and in a somehow primitive way joint, assembled in new compositions, not unlike 3D mosaics. Their identity is to a certain extent lost, but with a bit of focus it is still recognisable.
Certain concentration, but also distraction, is projected in the way we perceive the work of Anna; how we are getting lost in the details, our sight jumping from one part to another. We may perceive the character of the work and the used materials as a sort of abstraction of contemporary civilisation, its constant short term distraction, lack of concentration, mass quantity but inability to include the whole. There is also something rough and brutal about Anna’s works, in the impudency, rudimentarity of the treatment, that follows the cheapness of the original objects, but almost with a somehow neurotic drive. Thousand-times-twisted threads, pieces of roller bearings and belt studs, are somehow an allegoric depiction of our accelerated presence, the inability to cease, the getting almost to a neurotic psychosis of a drug addict losing themselves to total exhaustion in different details.
The bathroom of Anna Solal is definitely an impoverished one. A small room, musty with dampness and sweet smell of cheap perfume, stains of mold and bad colours of bad make-up. The beauty of the poor, too sweet, too fake. There is something intimate in it, but also repulsive. Something used. It is as if we are facing leftovers of what allowed us to put ourselves together.
In the drawings of towels, clothes scattered on the floor, old toothbrushes and flung shoes we again arrive at a somehow neurotic, even hallucinatory point. The pedicure set transforms itself into a traffic jam and the back view on a girl combing her hair in the repetition changes into some unclear nebula, color stain or a puddle of a body liquid. The assembling and composing is therefore also possible to read as somehow an attempt to hold together a harmony or a system in a situation, where the drive has liberated itself from original impulse and became an out-of-control spiral.
Michal Novotný
Lieu de l’intimité et du soin, la salle de bain met entre parenthèses la vie au-dehors. On cesse d’être exposé au monde et on se retrouve seul pour se mettre au propre. On se prépare aux lendemains et on se répare. Le miroir aide à rêver, à se redéfinir. Le corps tout entier se délasse et improvise une cosmétique. Après La Convalescence (New Galerie, 2018), Anna Solal explore l’espace domestique et livre quelques repères pour une salle de bain. À sa manière habituelle, elle mélange des matériaux bon marché, archaïques et futuristes, en privilégiant cette fois le dessin par rapport à la sculpture. Elle avance sur un fil. Les œuvres qu’elle propose flirtent avec le danger. Des lames de rasoirs encadrent la beauté des miroirs. Le meuble de salle de bain sombre dans l’évanescence, on ne trouve rien à l’intérieur. C’est le vide et du papier toilette pour l’essuyer. Quel passé pourrait bien s’effacer dans un lavabo ? On ne se refait pas. Aucune solution de rechange. À terre on a posé ses chaussures : de vieilles godasses à la Van Gogh. On voudrait se délester d’une vie embourbée, se faire plus léger mais justement, après les piétinements de la journée de travail ou les kilomètres à traîner en ville, comment se défaire de ces pas perdus, comment se remettre un peu à neuf ?
Anna Solal ne cesse de se soustraire au monde de l’Utilité, à cet affreux Grand Réel qui nous conduit à la catastrophe. Quitter les aléas de ce monde, c’est bien beau, mais qu’est-ce qui se passe alors ? Anna Solal se coltine l’énigme mais ne résout rien. Dans sa salle de bain, il y a surtout des objets, des ustensiles, des tissus. Le corps se montre en pièces décalées, à travers des empreintes bancales, des maquillages hasardeux, des fétiches. Une chevelure revient trois fois mais de cette femme aux longs cheveux on peine à reconnaître le visage. L’identité hésite et réclame d’autres rendez-vous, en d’autres pièces de la maison qu’Anna Solal construit peu à peu, et qu’elle destine à Celle qui n’existe pas.
Jérôme Solal
To 16/07/2019 from 15/09/2019 at Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA
thanks to Nastassia Kotava and Constance Colmaire for her precious help and support.
Photography credit : Tomas Souček.