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Lot Essay
One of the leading Southeast Asian artists of her generation born in the early 1970s, Geraldine Javier came to art after obtaining a degree in nursing. An abiding fascination with death, and the symbolisms and representations of death, and conversely, life and the living world, many of Javier's works are sustained explorations between the real and the fantastical.
The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair (Lot 160) is a typically visually bewitching work of the artist, bold in vision and execution. Javier paints the figure of a young girl in what seems like a nightgown, with an unmistakable feminine quality about her. She is in a yogi's reverse arch pose in descent mid-way down the staircase of a home. If the visage is the most obvious element of one's identity, Javier's painted girl is effaced of one. Instead, tatting - lace strengthened in knots and loops - pour out of a open vitrine that has replaced her face. Not contend with the strength of the painted image, Javier creates a mixed media work in The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair, with the tatting extending over a step plinth. Her painted world comes alive, literally, occupying a physical presence.
It is a painting that bridges the filmic with the pictorial, incorporating key elements of the horror film genre. The riveting terror of the scene is already played out in viewers' own primal fear, stoked by the familiarity of the scene, and its possibly macabre underbelly.
Exhibited in Arario Gallery, Seoul in 2010, The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair forms part of a body of works centred around exploring the sinister undercurrent of ordinary life. Javier's female protagonists may bear the seeming appearance of normalcy but beneath the veneer of their ordinariness lay complex, off-kilter psychological situations. Highly symbolist in nature, Javier's pictorial language is unflinching, stirring as much a strong emotional response as the provocation of the mind.
The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair (Lot 160) is a typically visually bewitching work of the artist, bold in vision and execution. Javier paints the figure of a young girl in what seems like a nightgown, with an unmistakable feminine quality about her. She is in a yogi's reverse arch pose in descent mid-way down the staircase of a home. If the visage is the most obvious element of one's identity, Javier's painted girl is effaced of one. Instead, tatting - lace strengthened in knots and loops - pour out of a open vitrine that has replaced her face. Not contend with the strength of the painted image, Javier creates a mixed media work in The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair, with the tatting extending over a step plinth. Her painted world comes alive, literally, occupying a physical presence.
It is a painting that bridges the filmic with the pictorial, incorporating key elements of the horror film genre. The riveting terror of the scene is already played out in viewers' own primal fear, stoked by the familiarity of the scene, and its possibly macabre underbelly.
Exhibited in Arario Gallery, Seoul in 2010, The Girl Who Swallowed Her Hair forms part of a body of works centred around exploring the sinister undercurrent of ordinary life. Javier's female protagonists may bear the seeming appearance of normalcy but beneath the veneer of their ordinariness lay complex, off-kilter psychological situations. Highly symbolist in nature, Javier's pictorial language is unflinching, stirring as much a strong emotional response as the provocation of the mind.