Curated by Aida Valdez
Harper’s is pleased to announce Jolie Laide, a group exhibition featuring new works by three female artists: Mercedes Llanos, Bea Scaccia, and Ana Villagomez. Jolie Laide opens Wednesday, November 8, with a reception attended by the artists.
The term jolie laide derives from the French expression used to describe women who are unconventionally attractive. This tension between what is appealing and what is unsavory resides at the pith of the exhibition. Llanos, Scaccia, and Villagomez wane in and out of figuration and abstraction to chart the poetics of the beautiful and the monstrous. With distinctive visual expressions, each artist invites the viewer to consider the interior reflections and social paradigms that inform this thorny yet wonderous intersection. The work in Jolie Laide inspires meditation on these aesthetic and ideological locales: the featured artists invite viewers to contemplate questions of gender and mythology as they allude to the things we revere and fear.
For Mexican-American artist Ana Villagomez, the landscapes we inhabit—both physically and psychically—are laden with imagery that is at once grotesque and desirous. Villagomez’s collagist approach to abstraction involves excavating the labyrinthine inner workings of her cerebral world. The resultant works conjure silhouettes of imagined creatures set within mystical scenes that call forth the sometimes troubling terrain of folklore and dreams. In Minor Devils, for example, a dark web of interlocking branches and abstruse figures is confined within an oval shape, staged against a neutral gray backdrop. Immersed in the shadows of the hypnotic night, the scene floats across the canvas like an open corridor presenting one’s fortune. Villagomez’s pastiche of references and moods feels present here: the circuitous marks speckled with chalky green and red hues recall supernatural fairytale illustrations, rife with figuration reminiscent of birds, twigs, and foliage.
Across her captivating paintings, Bea Scaccia also juxtaposes motifs that haunt and entice. The Italian artist creates otherworldly scenes wherein dense coils of hair adorned with sumptuous pearls, belts, brilliantly colored nails, and other accessories stand in for the feminine figure. Absent of skin and facial features, female forms instead occupy the bodies of anonymous creatures much like those obscure feminine characters prevalent in the opuses of surrealist artists by the likes of Leonor Fini, whose work in fashion and fine art has influenced Scaccia. Scaccia gestures towards this legacy of twentieth-century surrealism throughout. In works like A setting of sensual dignity and Is it a dirty secret or moonlight in her hair?, neverending tresses curl into fingers that grip luminous chalices and lampshades. With bountiful gems spilling out from the braided locks, the decadent and bizarre scenes are reminiscent of those in French surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s 1946 classic, The Beauty and the Beast.
Like Scaccia and Villagomez, Mercedes Llanos takes a circuitous route toward figuration. The artist renders distorted human bodies across gender spectrums in states of motion as they camouflage against pools of rich pigmentation. The source material for these works often derives from Llanos’s dreams; her hand performs as a guide, translating her subconscious imagination to tangible mark-making on the canvas. She traditionally renders nude bodies in a sketchy, porous manner, echoing the fleeting nature of the dreamscape. The artist carves fluid contours that help shape pliant body parts as they fold into one another and sometimes meet in erotic embrace. Such is the case in Origen. Here, an amalgam of pastel tones resemble flesh, while rippling striations slice through the canvas like wounds. The application of the paint is at once gentle and jarring—shadows of auburn and chestnut present sudden contrast in the enigmatic work.
Ultimately, Jolie Laide celebrates its visual and ideological contradictions throughout. Across their divergent approaches to storytelling, the artists chart the proximity between visibility and obscurity, luminance and darkness, and beauty and horror. In locating these aesthetic meeting grounds, the artists each erect new geographies that circumvent passive consumption, and instead invite viewers to consider the dynamic and at times perplexing relationship between individual reality and external perception.
Mercedes Llanos (b. 1992, Mer del Plata, Argentina) received a BFA from University of Tennessee, Chattanooga in 2015, and an MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2021. Llanos’s work has been the subject of presentations at Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires (2023); Balice Hertling, Paris (2022); Modus Locus, Minneapolis (2018); and Frequency Arts, Chattanooga (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at Someday Gallery, New York (2023); Balice Hertling, Paris (2023); Lyles and King, New York (2023); Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn (2022); and LIT Gallery, Chattanooga (2017). Llanos lives and works in New York City.
Bea Scaccia (b. 1978, Frosinone, Italy) received degrees from Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, and School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work has been the subject of presentations at JDJ, New York (2022); Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2021); Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York (2018); Cuchifritos, New York (2014); and Effearte, Milan (2014). Most recently, Scaccia has participated in group exhibitions at La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2022); Museo Crocetti, Rome (2021); Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, NY (2020); and Steven Harvey Fine Art, New York (2017). Her work is held in the collection of institutions, including Farnesina Art Collection, Rome; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viareggio, IT; and Portland Museum of Art, ME. Scaccia lives and works in New York City.
Ana Villagomez (b. 1991, Houston, TX) received a BFA from University of Houston in 2013, and an MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2021. Her work has been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, Houston (2023); Martha’s Contemporary, Austin (2023); Farewell Books, Austin (2015); and Project Row Houses, Houston (2012). A solo exhibition is slated at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2024. Most recently, Villagomez has participated in group exhibitions at Christie’s, New York (2023); Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2023); Dallas Art Fair (2023); Rusha & Co., Los Angeles (2022); and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (2022). Villagomez lives and works in Brooklyn.