“La Boucherie” is a fairly literal piece although is softened by Godigna Collet’s choice of materials.
It is in concert with popular writings on the grotesque in art like Frances S. Connelly’s The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play 2.
In Robert Storr’s 2004 curation of Site Sante Fe, he cited the grotesque’s agency as “a spirit which unites formal opposites: emotional and intellectual conflicts, beauty and ugliness, delight and delirium, tragedy and comedy.” 3.
Soutine and Bacon have famously painted scenes of their local butcher shops. In “La Boucherie” Godigna Collet presents us with a lifesize disembowelment sculpture. Large steel hooks are laden with gauzy red fabric pouring to the floor. Not a prom dress, it is a blood bath.
She goes whole hog as this work acknowledges that humans are killers, that we carry innate violence within us. We are capable of the destruction of nature and of each other. We may have a choice to nurture.
She is able to look steely eyed at this dark side of people and perhaps cajole us into a more complex and nuanced vision of our nature.
Rachel Koper, Sept. 2019
2.Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play, Cambridge University Press, 201
3.Robert Storr, Disparities & Deformations: Our Grotesque, Site Santa Fe, 2004
