Unrestricted

“Frederic Cabocel’s “Unrestricted” exchanges the fleshy and mutative aesthetic of his recent works for a more cosmological, explicit style. While the subject is composed of disjointed colors and occasionally seems to be fused with herself, her form is collected into an absolute anatomical truth within her striking black leotard.

Students of Paul Gaugin will inexorably place the composition of “Unrestricted” as a veiled pastiche of the 20th century French synthesist’s final work, “Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where Are We Going?”. While maintaining Gaugin’s life-cycle narrative, Cabocel saw his right-to-left chronological flow as a “mistake to be corrected.” The original characters of Gaugin’s work, however, are blended and memorialized into the background, and the golden top corners are restored in a new vividness.

The subject of the painting, Canadian dancer Carole Prieur, is shown in multiple poses from a single performance (Etude Nº1), seeming to emulate a passage through life. The scream of birth that she lets out and reverberates in her recording is captured in her first pose, and her body proceeds to travel across time down a nearly implicit red carpet.

The symbolism of the stages of life are present in silk-screened icons throughout the sections of the painting. Birth features preview screens and a vintage cinema countdown. Ongoing life hosts experimentation and decadence through a dancing gypsy (The iconic mascot of Gitanes, Gainsbourg’s favorite cigarette brand) and the Hermes logo. Death concludes with a nod to Leonardo Da Vinci and Damien Hirst: the cleaned skull and the fly, now fed and fully grown from its pinkish nymph on the left. Until the alleged wisdom of old age, the dancer is surrounded by the cameras of her own “cult of the self.”

Constant throughout “Unrestricted” are the prints of Yves Klein’s famous photo, Leap into the Void. By displaying Klein’s jump in its full setting during the birth, and then only his falling body throughout, Cabocel states that life is a continuous movement through nothingness, free from any final destination but death. Similarly, the Hermes logo is meant to be a stand in for the actual Olympian god of the same name, known in part as the guide to the underworld. The references to Gaugin, Klein, the Hermes brand, Gitanes, and the Gaulish helmet are all tributes to Cabocel’s French Heritage.  

A flapping crow seems to urge Prieur’s resisting body towards the terminus of the carpet, and another (or the same, perhaps) waits in amused expectation in front of her final destructive pose.”

Sinclair Britten Cabocel, July 28, 2018