Episode 154: Ghislaine “Ghi” Fremaux: Indulgence of the Body in Art

Ghislaine Fremaux or Ghi as she is known is a female artist from west Texas. Her evocative, large-scale figural works, intimately engaged, interrogate her canvases. In my conversation with Fremaux we explore the “nude body in a clothed society,” the role of the camera placed against her belly in “uninstructed, spontaneous encounters,” and more!
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Learn more about Fremaux’s work, practice and collaborative with husband Lando Velez
Website: www.fremauxvaldez.com
IG: @ghislainefremaux
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Resources for this podcast episode include Museum of Modern Art and the writings of Stephen Little.

Script: The nude bodies composed by the artist Ghislaine, or Ghi as she is called, Fremaux emit powerful reactions when viewed. Large scale naked and nude figures interrogate Fremaux’s canvases. Through striking outlines and evocative colors she creates bodies in “spontaneous and unrestricted encounters.” Fremaux is interested in “meanings and experiences of nudity within clothed society.” Yet her depictions are resonant with her emotions, her feelings towards and with the bodies she creates–unidealized, fluid, Fremaux captures the folds, the droops, the curves. The vitality of her bodies is amplified in color and scale. Let’s dive in—in a few moments Ghi and I will have a more in depth conversation about her work and practice—but first  let’s journey through two works, her medium is chalk pastel to paper. She describes the canvas crafted from paper as “like skin itself—it’s porous, pliant and perfurable. Her own skin rises and falls and spreads through the application of chalk pastel to the paper canvas—there is an intimate interaction between the media, chalk, paper, and the amplified bodies she expresses.

From her series “Carnal Unknowing,” the piece “Parallel Play commixion Emma, Ghi,” 2019 8×12 feet pastel gouache on paper—two nude women, their bodies languidly sprawled on a bed are embraced in a kiss. One woman, lying on her back, hair is splayed in long strands above her head. Her eyes are closed, her lips lock into her lover’s, a female figure, her long hair falls over most of her face, her hand braces the reclined women’s face, raising her chin.—you can feel the slight tension as the  lips meet. From the waist up we see their nude bodies, breasts pressed and collapsing into each other; below the waist Fremaux creates a collage, a bed covering, combining simplistic shapes, jagged, chaotic lines, pieced together like a quilt—on some of the patch-like areas are recognizable body parts like a hand, or arms. Fremaux’s treatment of the bodies—they are drawn with an expressive, seemingly chaotic lines and blurred application of reds, greens, blues. The sexually charged gestural bodies seep and rise with primal emotion.

When I contemplate Fremaux’s bodies, I think of the German Expressionism. An early 20th century movement, German artists, forming a group they called Die Brucke (The Bridge), produced distorted, figurative images in unnatural often jarring colors. They rejected traditional classical poses and idealized bodies for depictions of “unrehearsed and uninhibited poses” of their girlfriends or other acquaintances in the studio or nature—expressing “frank sexuality.” In Fremaux’s work I see elements of Expressionism, through the elements of color, bold, vivid, line, more frenetic than the Expressionist, but equal to both is palpable sexuality.

Another work, from the Carnal Unknowing series, 2019, “f,or,ever” we see torsos, in the upper half of the canvas a woman’s partial torso, exposing one breast, below is a segment of an arm, hand resting on a hip; Fremaux builds up the forms with her signature lines and blending of flesh hues, we see a drawing of a bent leg in black, a sheath of bright yellow creates boundary, an architectural element in between the segmented body parts. In the forefront another partial torso; in my looking experience to be honest I am unable to fully interpret, even for myself, meaning—the body parts are not expressed like in a medical text; they are fluid and robust, we can’t identify the person, there is no faces, more like studies. Perhaps Fremaux segments parts of the body from sexual intimacy or experience she illustrates so candidly in other works in the series.

The bodies Fremaux composes are “friends and partners.” Fremaux says, “Our work together originates in a spontaneous and uninstructed encounter. I hold a camera against my belly, its machinic eye fitfully blinking and yielding clumsy photographs. I work from these photos magnified by hundreds of degrees in the small screen of my phone. Her practice involves her personal experience, intimate physical experiences; present in those experiences is the camera documenting these intimate moments. Think about where the camera is placed; not on a tripod set to take a succession of images or in the hands of a third observer but physically against her body; a mechanical voyeur—what it captures is Fremaux’s guide or perhaps a blueprint to translate the  physically intimacies onto her large scale canvases. Wow!

So now that you have explored her couple of her works and a glimpse of her practice, please join me in more in-depth look at the captivating work of Fremaux in my conversation.