The article is titled “From Women to Women” and begins with an oriental proverb: “A woman who sleeps alone sleeps with the devil.” It is signed by Jean-Luc Vannier and constitutes an analytical study of the works of the Nice artist Marie-Chantal. She paints “a woman, women, Woman, inexorably, tirelessly.” The psychoanalytic approach allows for an understanding that these oils on canvas operate as “an eternal return, a compulsive expression, a force impossible to control.” And the psychoanalyst questions: “it is no longer very clear who, the artist or the woman, becomes the thing of the other, who, the canvas or the observer, enjoys possessing the other.”
Illustrated with numerous portraits, the article mixes reflections on the work and the personality of the artist, evoking in the course of conversations with her, moments of her history likely to illuminate the desires and technical choices of her pictorial approach. “Marie Chantal gives names of attitudes to her army of Messalinas,” specifies JL Vannier. So many “devouring women, ready to pounce on a possible prey.” And to conclude this long exploration of the artist’s psyche: “surrounded by Marie Chantal’s ‘Barbies,’ we are already ready to surrender. There is no pleasure in commanding where there was no pain in subduing.”
Let us note that JL Vannier also signs in the same issue of this journal a “monographic study” of a painting by Cyrus Pahlavi with the evocative title “Pervert,” which describes the “trauma of a scene of infantile seduction by an adult woman.”
Arts and Psychoanalysis, No. 202, Collective under the direction of Eva Brabant, Editions Eres, 2010.
[Link to source](https://www.editions-eres.com/resultat.php?Id=2535)
