Chloé Piene

Born in 1972 in Stamford (USA),she lives in New York.

The art of the young American Chloe Piene, being shown at Les Abattoirs, is split between short video works and quasi-hypnotic drawing performances at which the artist claims to literally come out of herself. At the heart of both is a single preoccupation with reinvesting the body, the artist?s tool, with an experience of the world at once interior and physical, to which end she preaches the abandonment of mind and body.

Her videos depict characters in strange poses, plunged into fantastical atmospheres tinged with sensuality, primitive rituals, and occasionally violence.

The drawings, which recall Schiele, Klimt, and Artaud, depict bodies apparently caught in the throes of ecstasy. For Piene, the unseen is shrouded in fantasy and imagination, and is as important as perceptible reality. The vertigo of immersion, in the image of the orgasm, permits the abolition of all limits and the recasting of the body as a hypersensitive interface.