Relentless Hope | Works on Aluminium

The ‘Relentless Hope’ series consists of mixed media works on Aluminium created using physi-digital processes ranging from painting to photography, digital manipulation to collage and printmaking. The pieces explore the contradictory forces that make up so much of our embodied human experience; the liminal spaces between the external and the internal, the physical and psychological, and the ongoing struggle between the mortal body and the possibility of an eternal spirit. 

Fontaine-Wolf integrates self-portraiture to explore her own experience of the human condition, bringing a quality of intimacy to the pieces. The nature of the images created however -  faceless, distorted and almost otherworldly - allows for these images to extend outwards from the purely personal into the realm of the archetypal. 

The use of mirrors in composing the images draws on Fontaine-Wolf’s ongoing interest in Vanitas symbolism and Lacanian mirror theory, whilst also referencing her interest in mysticism and the occult. The reflections of the segmented body explore contemporary concerns with self-image and digital representation, which can lead us to feel a deep sense of fragmentation in much the same way as mirror-gazing can have a  dissociative effect on our sense of identity.

The presence of hands in this series of works act as gestures towards dissolution - multiplied and disembodied. Grasping in the dark without eyes to guide them, they continue on impelled by a sense of relentless hope. 

InFems - Biting Back and Enjoying the Taste - Exhibition Catalogue Excerpt

With Fontaine-Wolf using her own naked body in her photographs, there is an element of self-portraiture in the work. She is literally laying herself bare, revealing and concealing, choosing what to let us see. The fact this body belongs to a young, white, beautiful, able-bodied woman might attract the same criticism levelled at Cindy Sherman’s early Untitled (Film Stills) (1977-80), namely that she is playing to the desiring “male gaze.” However, like Sherman, Fontaine-Wolf deliberately complicates her images to create something much more troubling and more rooted in the female experience of looking at herself, rather than only being looked at by others. 

Her ‘Relentless Hope’ series (2021) comprises mixed media works on aluminium which she created using a range of physi-digital processes from the more traditional media like painting, collage, printmaking and photography to digital manipulation. Even the traditional does not look familiar, though, because of her experimental approach to technique. Some marks are carefully controlled; others created through chance. The forms morph between figurative and abstract: a leg that seems to disintegrate into a brushstroke; the discernible curve of a thigh, a head that disappears amid smoke-like flourishes of paint. It is no coincidence that walking has become a key part of Fontaine-Wolf’s artistic process; an action that enables her to clear her head and process her thoughts. Our eye is in constant motion, travelling across the surfaces of her works to map the body, to make sense, for instance, of breasts that appear in the “wrong” place in The Luminous Dark III.

There is a glorious sensuousness in Fontaine-Wolf’s use of colour. In The Luminous Dark I, II, and III (each 100 x 200 cm) cool lapis blues, violets and pinks vie with greys. The figure’s skin is green in parts, alien or snake-like, recalling the snake in early depictions of the Garden of Eden, the snake of temptation that came with a woman’s face. (In her 2020 Malus works, we see a spill of juicy red fruits, including cherries and pomegranates with their associations of virginity and Persephone, of blood. Their imminent disintegration is in the best tradition of vanitas painting). Here is both a mortal body that is destined to age and decay versus what Fontaine-Wolf, with her interest in mysticism and the occult, calls the ‘possibility of an eternal spirit.’ 

We orient ourselves by the edges of a mirror that is held up, a body reflected back on itself. Art is full of mirrors. Those mirrors have multiple meanings: self-knowledge, the faculty of reasoning, Truth. The mirror appears in images of the cardinal virtue of Prudence to imply that the ability to see something from multiple angles is a mark of wisdom. Whilst the mirror is not always associated with women, (think Narcissus), it mostly is. So, it also features in personifications of the vices: Lust grips her mirror; a devil lurks in Pride’s. Accusations of Vanity are never far away. Iconic examples in painting include Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) where the convex mirror has an elaborate frame with roundels depicting scenes from The Passion that exhort the fifteenth century viewer to remember the suffering of Christ every time they peruse their own face. Or Caravaggio’s Magdalene of Mary and Martha (c.1598) whose sixteenth century mirror is a symbol of the luxuries she will relinquish to follow Christ. 

In Fontaine-Wolf’s ‘Relentless Hope’ series, the mirror is also about the challenge of digital representation. Mirrors, like photographs, were once held to be receptacles of our soul. Already Fontaine-Wolf has described ‘the contradictory forces that make up so much of our embodied human experience.’ By this she means those liminal spaces that occur between the external and internal, the boundaries between physical and psychological. In cultures where the selfie has become common currency and the photograph can be flipped, re-sized, re-coloured, where self-image is under constant scrutiny and ‘curation,’ both me and not-me, it is easy to feel fragmented. Artists have used the trope of the female body in the mirror to explore the disconnect between how we appear to others and how we appear to ourselves (Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932). Louise Bourgeois went as far as describing the mirror as her ‘enemy’ at one point, since she could not accept the self she saw in it and therefore could not accept herself. As a result of this disassociation, she banned mirrors. When she recognised the danger of that, it shifted her viewpoint. ‘You see this mirror here?’ she told an interviewer, ‘It is not [here] out of vanity—it is a deforming mirror. It doesn't reflect me, it reflects somebody else. It reflects a kind of monstrous image of myself. So I can play with that’ (cited in Bernadac, Marie-Laure and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Eds. Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997 London: Violette, 1998, p.260-261.) Perhaps, as viewers, we are doomed to project our selves onto the images others make; and perhaps it is this that Velasquez realised when the mirror in his (‘Rokeby’) Toilet of Venus, 1644 returned a blurred reflection, concealing the nude’s identity or, more likely, allowing us to imagine the face of our fantasies on her supine body. Fontaine-Wolf’s own face is obscured or distorted in her images, ‘even otherworldly,’ she has said. Like a spirit, an apparition captured unexpectedly in a photograph. A sleight of hand in the way a Victorian ghost could be conjured with ectoplasm. This shifts the focus from her as individual to an archetype.

In Relentless Hope (200 x 250 cm), Fontaine-Wolf’s figure is even more fragmented, repeated, seen through a kaleidoscope of layered shards. The mirror distorts. Manet plays tricks on us with the barmaid’s reflection in Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882) which appears wrong but is, in fact, technically correct. Michelangelo Pistoletto shatters mirrors; Yayoi Kusama creates infinity rooms where mirrors double and redouble us ad infinitum. In Fontaine-Wolf’s work there is a similar sense of dislocation as limbs multiply like those of ancient Hindu deities or the many-limbed figures of Los Angeles painter Christina Quarles. Fontaine-Wolf’s use of mirrors also reflects (pun intended) her interest in French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory. Basing his thinking on empirical evidence, Lacan argued that the mirror stage is where the very young child recognises itself in a reflective surface. As the child’s experiences at this stage are often negative (marked by frustration, anxiety, distress) because it is not yet mature or autonomous, depending on others for food etc., the image it sees in the mirror is alluringly whole and ‘together;’ it is like the adults that surround it. The child reaches out to try to touch this image. Fontaine-Wolf’s hand is often visible, multiplied, seen grasping a mirror or a mirror’s frame. For Lacan we, in our adult state, are destined to chase this elusive image of harmony and mastery over ourselves forever – an attempt doomed to failure. Yet as Fontaine-Wolf’s title Relentless Hope implies, we press on, regardless, this apparently disembodied hand of the artist leading us on.

Marie-Anne Mancio, 2021