Aimée Hoving
L’Etre Aimée
In my work, beauty is everything. The beauty of the light, the beauty of the framing and the beauty of the compositions. I like to arrange everything, to have something harmonious and enhanced. This is how I manage to reach a certain idea of art and channel certain emotions, some neurosis and enhance them.
It’s not a coincidence if I like these images with double meaning, taut to perfection, precise and suggestive. I come from Vermeer’s country where the still-life painting was invented.
In this very intimist series, I take the risk to unveil a bit more of my story, the sufferings of my childhood, the silences, the loneliness and the emptiness. This series was never shown before.
My model is my daughter, Flavia. We’ve been collaborating for a few years now. In a way, with her, I can replay some emotions or moments of my childhood. She understood my work and knows how to adapt it to enhance it.
A serious childhood where joy and expansion are not allowed, where the feeling of disappearance is stronger than the desire of living but where all the beauty that surrounds me prevails. The places I grew up, the spaces, the noble materials fill my imagination and my memories.
In this universe, reassuring and oppressive at the same time, warm and cold with conventions, images and traditions, I play with mirrors, a doll house. There are also these repetitive patterns of child bedroom wallpapers, these tensed hands, a muffled scream that rebounds in these sophisticated decors where a kitsch knick-knack of a surreal Christ presides.
At last, there is this plunging view on the shore where the waves broke and this little girl’s pair of legs that overhang the abyss. Will she fall? Won’t she? Will she free herself from this suffering that she held inside her for so long? Like in a phantasmagoric tale in which an Alice in Confusion land seemed to be held captive, the threat lingers. What will happen next? A cry or, at last, a tinkling liberating laugh?
In this series, I put in tension this feeling of threat, confusion, vertigo and awkwardness with beauty like a frame. Like a screen that distance and give to the one who look at the image enough space to interpret these images.
