In the group of three images entitled Trigémeos Inofensivos [Harmless Triplets], Susanne Themlitz resorts to photography as record of a performative moment, in which her own face is the protagonist of a fanciful and unlikely disguise. This staged distortion engages in a characteristic strategy of the artist’s multidisciplinary work, which recurrently leaves us facing the uncanny and eccentric.

We come across a species of bizarre beings in these photographs, amongst the many other that inhabit the surreal worlds created and animated by Susanne Themlitz. As common as it has become, the spectator is unable to recognize these iconographically unclassifiable characters within the scope of his own references. Although, even if the figures may seem strange to us, they do not form any threat but are, quite on the contrary, harmless, as the work title forewarns. The images are able to overthrow, with humour, the immediate correlation between good and beautiful or bad and ugly, emerging instead as forms of derision and provocation against the seriousness of conventions and the canons of aesthetic correctness.

CC

November 2011