AGONY

Charlie Malgat’s œuvre has developed over the years around an obsession for the living : « that which moves, dances, convulses, modifies itself and then mutates so as to stay alive ». The human body is her land of experimentation : she studies, examines, dissects, and then revives it—directing choreographed organs and pieces of flesh that transcend towards an immersive, fictional universe sampled from humor and poetry, both sensual and trivial.

Alternating between video, multimedia installations, sculpture, sound, and drawing, each work metonymically deploys a part of the body in an independent system, driven by a vital energy which throbs and rumbles, summoning original feelings. The emancipation of these « feeling objects » is constituted by a to-and-fro game, that which is between interiority and exteriority : the object (i.e., stuffed sculptures) composed of foam and latex is literally « stuffed » with a matter ready to gush out.

Agony and the ensemble of Charlie Malgat’s work also questions our relationship to art and to its objects. The desire to breath life into, or to create, a living sculpture situates the artist in a lineage which had previously treated the body and the object as autonomous systems. This art designates the body as an object which, emancipated from all natural functions, can make way for the undetermined, the unruly, and the involuntary.

It is therefore in a non-subjective otherness and toward an emancipated other that the art of Charlie Malgat takes shape. Through the tribulations of her living objects, she encourages us to examine the often-intoxicated insides of systems that surround us, which fail and regenerate infinitely.