Undressed

Tulle dresses

Variable dimensions

2005

Undresses
Claudia Casarino's work consists of the presentation of twenty tulle dresses suspended as if they were distributed inside a closet. But the wardrobe is also absent: the dresses are exhibited directly to the eye. A disoriented gaze that, in the near absence of matter to cut it off, crosses the very light barrier of the tulle and ends up in the sharp shadows it casts on the nearby wall.
 "Art leaves the prey for its shadow," says Lèvinas. But it desires both: the object and its image. In this pendulum swing it plays and plays itself: behind the real it risks the truth. The dress expels its own reality, stamps it against the wall: it reveals not only the emptiness of the human body, but the absence of its own textile corporeality, which appears supplanted by its reflection. 
In previous works, Claudia worked her own image as an excess of bodily presence. Now she does it as a lack: the hanging dress emphasizes the absence of its wearer with whom she always identifies herself ("man and dress, are they one?", Lacan asks). The dresses are designed by Claudia for her own size, they have her measurements and are arranged at her height: they are garments designed for herself. To erase the dress (to make it transparent, to turn it into a specter, a shadow) is to erase herself doubly, as a body (absent) and as her surrogate that has lost its consistency.
But the dress remains as a veiling tulle, as a possibility of minimally interposing itself between the object and its shadow.

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