Catherine Biocca:
Unfasten Seat Belt – at Jeanine Hofland, Amsterdam
A cotton-candy pink floor attacked with knives and hypodermic syringes, doodle-like subtle drawings of brutal figures and events depicted on domestic surfaces, and cartoonesque animations set out a seductive yet unheimisch landscape within Catherine Biocca’s solo exhibition at the gallery entitled Unfasten Seat Belt.
This diverse and often unfamiliar use of media, harmless and cheerful animated figures executing the most painful events, and loosely drawn figures depicting hidden violent fantasies that can pop up when deeply frustrated, characterize the artist’s work. Masochistic themes and behaviour that is merged into the contrary aesthetic of the safe heaven.
Within her art practice Catherine Biocca is interested in this dark side of the ordinary, or to put it in other words; the momentum where brutality and pure innocence meet and can co-exist. The split second when ‘schadenfreude’ is created; when we laugh about and enjoy the mental or physical pain of others. Although Biocca sets out an unfamiliar stage of the absurd to articulate the latter, she simultaneously taps into an important art historical debate on form and content. On how art can create a leisure-like and deeply aesthetic experience whilst depicting the most brutal events – often emphasized by Biocca’s direct references to scenes from Greek and Roman mythology.
Catherine Biocca
Unfasten Seat Belt
4 June–9 July 2016
De Clercqstraat 62
Amsterdam
Images courtesy of the artist and Jeanine Hofland Gallery.