Jolie Laide / I’m Not Sure What You Looked Like
2020-2024
Images of heads painted with ink on paper
Esther Solondz Press Release
Esther Solondz
Jolie Laide / I wasn’t sure what you looked like
Jan 5 – Jan 27, 2024 at Gallery NAGA
The continuing evolution of Esther Solondz’s fascination with portraits and transformative materials is expressed in her new work. For the past 20 years, she’s worked with suggestive half-here, half-there images made with substances that evolve over time. In her current exhibition, Solondz is using ink, which she applies to wet paper. This allows for a certain amount of control but also happy accidents as the ink moves and pools in unforeseen ways.
The exhibition is comprised of grids of ghostly portraits, some with animal-like features, others appearing as magicians (rabbits included), and still others appear as tender renderings like a grade-school photograph. The portraits give the impression that they are antique; they are faded and aged as if they come from a past century. Who are these people and where did they come from? A question Solondz has been trying to answer in her work for the last thirty years.
Asked about the title of the exhibition, Jolie Laide: I wasn’t sure what you looked like, Solondz explains,
My friend Tina Cane, a poet, suggested the title Jolie Laide, which means a strange unconventional beauty. Literally jolie laide means “pretty-ugly.” In trying to respond to this question I looked up jolie laide online and found an article by Daphne Merkin published in 2005 in the New York Times that was quite helpful. Here’s a quote from it that elucidated the concept far better than I could have:
“Jolie laide aims to jog us out of our reflexive habits of looking and assessing by embracing the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter: a bump on the nose, eyes that are set too closely together, a jagged smear of a mouth. It points away from the kittenish, pliant prettiness of Brigitte Bardot toward the tense, smolderingly imperfect allure of Anouk Aimée or Jeanne Moreau . . . Jolie laide recognizes that behind the visceral image lies an internal life. In that sense it is a triumph of personality over physiognomy, the imposition of substance over surface.”
As for the “I wasn’t sure what you looked like,” I think it was my way of saying that I wasn’t starting out with an idea about where these would go. They did not begin fully formed in my mind, as I did not know who they were or what they looked like. They evolved.