File Note 88: Caroline Achaintre

So many masks lie at the roots of modern art! Les Demoiselles d’Avignon would not exist as we know them without the African masks that Picasso saw at the Palais du Trocadéro ethnographic museum, which inspired the faces of two female figures in that legendary painting. In the same period, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other artists in Die Brücke group gave the faces they painted the jutting features of other tribal masks seen in anthropological museums: not just from Africa, in this case, but also from Inuit tribes and Oceania. Traditional Japanese masks were used to illustrate the Almanach (1912) of the other great German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter. In Russia, Natalia Goncharova and other artists from the avant-garde group Jack of Diamonds turned their backs on Western figurative culture and sought inspiration in the kindly or terrifying expressions of Chinese masks, or the solemn features of the ritual masks used by Siberian shamans. But even before European artists discovered ‘primitive’ art, masks had played a fundamental role in Symbolist and fin de siècle culture. Mysterious animated masks float in the skies drawn by Odilon Redon; twisted, sneering carnival masks throng the canvases of Emil Nolde and James Ensor; disquieting mythological masks appear in the paintings of Fernand Khnopff and Arnold Böcklin. The mask is such an important subject in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art that a few years ago it inspired a major exhibition Masks, from Carpeaux to Picasso ¹.

Is Achaintre’s work just a formal divertissement? It certainly contains an element of play, and a liberating, infectious revelry in shape and colour. But there is something else as well. To understand what, we must go back to where we started, with the popularity of masks in the late 1800s and early 1900s. For turn-of-the century artists, they had a twofold, almost contradictory significance. On the one hand, they were a stylistic expedient that made it possible to leap past the conventions of realism, speeding down the path that led to art as an autonomous form of expression – what would soon come to be called ‘Abstraction’. On the other, masks offered a new and terribly effective vocabulary for portraying the contemporary world. In the work of Ensor and the Expressionists, masks do not hide the faces: they themselves are faces, monstrous ones, and for that very reason, ultimately recognisable. The avid, savage, demented grimaces of Ensor’s carnival masks are the true faces the painter attributed to the bourgeoisie of his hometown, Ostend; the grotesque features of Kirchner’s tribal masks are the true faces – brutish, neurotic, possessed – of the crowd the German painter saw in the streets of Berlin in his teens. Something similar is also there in Achaintre’s
work. On the one hand, her creations of paper, ceramic and wool have a wild grace of form and colour that suffices unto itself and sometimes they end up being ‘pure’ abstractions (and can be appreciated as such). On the other hand, whenever they are openly figurative (or their status is ambiguous enough to allow us to read them as such), they stage a subtle parody of our contemporary lifestyle, starting with the consumer mania of identifying with an object, an accessory, a style, to the point of merging with it entirely. Shopper (2012) is a mask that takes the shape of an upside-down shopping bag; Baac (2013) is an upended purse, the dangling handle of the former and crumpled one of the latter, serve as mouths. “You are what you buy”, both seem to mournfully croon – a concept underscored by the bases on which the artist places her ceramic creations, minimalist structures that are a cross between Donald Judd and the decor of a luxury boutique. Temp Mint (2013) is like an elegant black-and-white striped fabric (Chanel?) turned anthropomorphic: a fold serves as the mouth; two small holes hint at the eyes. Waffler (2012), with its golden colour and grid like texture, resembles just what the name would suggest: a waffle with human features. As for the ceramic masks mounted on leather cushions – like tongue-in-cheek tributes to the aggressive, bondage-style black leather heads full of studs and zippers that American artist Nancy Grossman made in the ’70s – they examine the parallel fetishization of commodities and sex. 

They’re beginning to look familiar, these ‘monsters’ of Caroline Achaintre’s. They are a gallery of ‘people today’, neurotic inhabitants of the contemporary metropolis: the fatuous fashion victim, the fanatical foodie, the compulsive patron of kink clubs, the New Age guru. They are our neighbours, our friends. They are us. To paraphrase Baudelaire, Achaintre might say, “Hypocritish viewer, — my fellow, — my brother!” ²