Esther Solondz: jolie Laide/ I wasn’t sure what you looked like
On View: January 5 - 27, 2024
Reception: Saturday, January 6, 4 – 6pm
Walk-through: Saturday, January 20, 2pm
“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.” - Esther Solondz
Esther Solondz
Esther Solondz work examines relationships between the past and the present and between our ordinary plane of existence and others.
Solondz's work is in the collections of the Harvard University Art Museums, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
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