Exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Jean-François Hamelin at the Espace Aguascalientes

Excerpt from Lancelot Hamelin’s tribute to his father: “…I have always felt that these images created by my father surrounded us with the modesty of things: to me, they were not depictions of naked bodies, but physical presences, which could be embarrassing but were not indecent. The works that bore the images were bodies. Sheets of paper, with or without a frame, stone—they were bodies and legal entities. Not images. Not characters. The representation of the female body thus honoured something other than what the gaze seeks in the usual image. What the feminine brings to the repertoire of possible forms in the universe... This is one of the aspects I find important, and particularly so today, when the debate on female alienation often overlooks this dimension of the issue, which ties in with a reflection on that other form of alienation: the image that is everywhere, and in which the female body seems to be over-represented in order to strip it of its capacity to enrich the repertoire of forms in the universe. There was also the way Hamelin depicts the gaze. With a certain indifference to the face as such. Some of his works, inspired by the archaic statuary of the Cyclades, reflect these faces reduced to the gaze..."