Dellaporta, Erene

The female body and how it has been depicted in society and through art has always fascinated me and has been a central theme in my work. Via humor, accident and control I explore love, desire and sexuality in women; who may be archetypal, fictitious or known to and posed by myself. I paint and draw from memory, imagination and images, which I manipulate in an extreme manner in order to over beautify or dramatize female forms and create characters that are quite dark, strange and sinister. I choose to take my subjects out of the context of a space and use bright, vibrant colors and fluid marks to create fantastical and sensual scenarios. I begin my practice by setting up photo shoots of girl friends, most recently in bathrooms, holding an object/weapon, which can range from an item as firm as a butchers knife or gun, to something as flimsy as a magic wand or shower hose. I think the space & the object creates a role-play for the model, even if they are not always depicted in my final paintings. There is an element of dark humour in my work, I naturally tend to over dramatise my subjects, letting them become on the one hand rather humorous and hyper-sexualised and on the other, containing quite a violent, morbid and horror/shock aspect to them. I like to create this kind of clumsy affect of a woman trying to be sexy rather than actually being sexy; by painting girls without breasts, they become these strange androgynous creatures, some look scared, fragile and vulnerable, while others look crazy, dominating and possessed. I also think the way the model plays with an object in either an aggressive or sensitive way causes it to adopt phallic references and could even lead it to becoming a male substitute in my work. My inspiration stems predominantly from a love of fairytales and an enthusiasm for cinema, particularly influenced by Oscar Wilde, Brothers Grimm and Luis Bunuel. In particular, I love Belle du Jour, which is a fantastic depiction in to the depths of a woman’s craziest of desires. I also find Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ very interesting and relevant to my practice. Mulvey argues that in classic hollywood films in particular women are merely represented to provide visual pleasure to men; the male gaze suggests there are only two ways of looking at a women, voyeuristic and fetishistic. I try to disturb this pleasurable element of looking in my paintings and emphasise the idea of the audience identifying with the object of the gaze as being looked at, in possibly an uncomfortable or self-conscious way. Ultimately my work resides between the fairytales told to us in our youth & the realities, which hit us when we enter into adult life. I have titled all my recent works 'Princess...' this developed from my enjoyment for fairytales, while also mocking the generalised idea of being called and wishing to be a princess as a little girl. The funny irony is, in the true ending of Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Little Mermaid', her Prince marries another woman and the mermaid throws herself into the sea, to her death. Unlike the Disney version where she ends up marrying her Prince and living happily ever after.

Primary Art Form
Visual Arts and Designer Makers

Other Artform categories
Applied Art
Painter / 2D
Sculptor
Visual Arts