This photograph is part of a series with the same title in which the black high-heeled shoes are the protagonist, as well as the floor of the studio. The artist, rather than create works specifically for a location or place, seems to affirm that the location is the studio and that the studio is her world. In that sense she works like a classical painter. She creates specific works in her own space, and refers the works she makes to the space in which she produces them, installing a process of dislocation of her own domesticity and imbuing this space of daily recognition with strangeness.

The strangeness of this image derives from the placing of the hands and feet, twisted and turned inward like a simian or a mischievous child who refuses to stand-up straight, an attitude reinforced by the fact that she is barefoot, her shoes rigorously placed in front of her feet, facing the wrong way – turned outwards – in a compositional exercise as simple as it is effective in its immediate graphic impact. To entitle this “To Seduce” is like applying yet another layer of bitter irony on the black and white surface of a work which does not aim for photography’s perfectionism but rather its clumsiness and expressiveness.

IC

May 2010