Regina de Con Cossío: Your pieces often seem like references to the world of medicine: the organs are exposed; the dissection of the bodies simulates an analytical study. How do you relate your artistic process with medicine, in particular with anatomy?

Nicole Chaput: Coral aggression occurs when these creatures spit out their guts to attack their neighbors and defend their territory. The mouth vomits up visceral mass, pushing digestive enzymes to dissolve its adversaries. After suffocating adjacent creatures, the coral swallows their guts. Like the coral, the internal spill becomes a strategy of resistance and survival in my artistic practice where I claim the territory and agency of my body and its boundaries in regular danger of being breached and extinguished.

The interior of female bodies in Western medicine has been interpreted and analyzed to be oppressed and marginalized, both the interior (reproductive capacities) and exterior (objectification, sexualization, desire education) of the female body have been articulated according to patriarchal views and agendas. From the witch hunts, the procedures and experiments to which women were subjected when diagnosed as hysterical, the deprivation of female pleasure, the anatomical Venus, and the fight over our right to abortion, are just a few examples of the cruelty of the scientific knowledge about female anatomy as politics of domination. As if someone always knew more than us and that gives them the right to decide.

Appropriating the visual traces of the mechanisms used to close wounds in Western medicine, such as surgical stitches, allows me to approach the body from a healing stage, where it seeks to heal a trauma. I call my most sculptural works puffy paintings, alluding to an internal process of reconstruction. I think of medical seams as moments of censorship of the body so that an overflow does not occur. The bodies I make speak from the wound, which is established as a portal to a private cosmology. It is a practice that unfolds the hierarchies between braids and guts, ribs and eyelashes…where navels and pupils are interchangeable.

The dissection of the bodies that I propose responds to an understanding of the interior of my body from the metaphor and from the possibility of self-fictioning what happens inside; starting from the enigma of not being able to visualize what my skin envelopes, and from the frustration of knowing that the information with which I approach my interiors is contaminated and influenced by a patriarchal entity. I think there is a power, and even a radical nature, in allowing the female anatomy to be imagined from fantasy. A femur can have a face, an intestine can be the tail that accompanies a woman in profile, turning her into a mermaid, and a pelvis can be a butterfly that flaps its wings intermittently before the ground claims it.

RCC: It has been mentioned that some of your pieces are linked to cinema. I am especially struck by The Brood, by David Cronenberg, a film director who in his early stage was inclined to expose bodies and blood. What was your approach to Cronenberg’s cinema?

NC: Cinema is one of the visual and narrative resources that I have relied on most recently. Perhaps that affinity is linked to the relationship I see between cinema and a good painting, which encompasses thousands of frames in a single image; causing the eye to be in constant motion. Cronenberg is one of the many directors I’ve been reviewing who deal with the body and abjection. What particularly excites me about Cronenberg is that he makes the interiors of the body into an artifact that, when seen, invokes a kind of wormhole or tunnel that facilitates a fluid exchange between the inside and the outside of the body, as if these two planes had different places and time frames. The Brood (1979) was particularly important because it deals with a female body that generates bodies from the moods of the protagonist. Arms from Existenz (1999) have influenced my color palette (also a nod to Eva Hesse; another latex master); in Crash (1996) I am interested in how one of the characters eroticizes the open wound she has on her calf.

Roman Polanski has also been very significant to me, especially in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with Mia Farrow and in Repulsion (1965) with Catherine Deneuve. In both, he makes present the internal pains, both psychic and physiological, through the changes in the appearance of the protagonists, as symptoms or moments of alarm that signal the terror that is occurring within the body of these women, to which we do not have access with our eyes. On the other hand, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972) and Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 1973) interest me because the materiality that alludes to the interior of the body is not in the body or in a prop, but is in the space and the scenery that contains the figures. In both films, the protagonists are eternally framed by red rooms, as if they were inside a larger body that they never manage to get out of; almost like organs or fetuses.

I am aware that all the references I have just named come from male directors, several with aggression records. However, I do not think it is productive to deny that my visual repertoire, both in cinema and painting, comes from male views of the body because it is symptomatic of sexism within both disciplines, and of the historical sexism in the interpretations of the female body; the masculine imaginary impregnated and internalized by the feminine body is a material that I use to be able to engender bodies that cite the signs of these conceptions while putting them in tension. This does not exclude the continuous responsibility of consuming and integrating the voices of directors such as Julia Ducournau, Agnès Varda, Céline Sciamma, Rebecca Miller, Věra Chytilová, Agnieszka Smoczynska and Suzan Pitt, whose works propose a profound reflection on the way in which a body figures feminine and the many specters that it can inhabit and uninhabit.

RCC: In that same sense, there is the relationship with the fashion of Alexander McQueen. Here I would like you to explain to us the relationship of your pieces to McQueen’s designs and to his presentations / performances, which at the time were experimental and controversial and earned him the nickname of the enfant terrible of fashion.

NC: Alexander McQueen has been one of the artists that has inspired me the most since my first approach to him, more or less when I was 14 years old and saw Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video (2009). McQueen said that all his designs were made on the body, thinking of himself as a plastic surgeon. With his garments, McQueen achieved a body architecture that transcended the human anatomies of those who wore them (here it is important to name Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier who have also been important references in relation to garments that functioned as deformation armor for the female anatomy). However, what seduces me about McQueen’s pieces is that in each look he managed to show elements that correspond to the interior and exterior of the body simultaneously, combining a plurality of exquisite and poetic materials, with a technique that made his tailoring have an almost sadistic frankness. McQueen said that he wanted people to be afraid of the women who wore his brand; and I relate to that desire. I seek that my works and that the female bodies that I portray are intimidating at first sight, but that they have a material richness that interrupts the immediacy of their consumption, betting on a visual intimacy that complicates the viewer’s approach to the work. Although the imaginaries I handle are raw, the care and time evidenced by the same materiality of the work puts the visceral content of the image in tension, which somehow reaffirms and contradicts itself, like a hologram.

When I was thinking about the Venus Atómica show at the Karen Huber Gallery, it was very clear to me that the bloated paintings that would go in the exhibition could not be presented inside a white cube. I felt that, if I had already managed to emancipate the female figures from the hyper-masculine structure of the frame, and having unfolded the way of representing women within the pictorial field, to present them in a white cube would be to enclose them again. From Venus Atómica it became very clear to me that creating an environment for objects is vital for my work; I feel that the white cube functions as an art airport, a space that annuls contexts. Definitely this is nurtured by McQueen’s ambitious catwalks, which acclimatized each of his collections and broke with the commercial expectation of his discipline, betting on showing the entirety of his rich universe.

Since puberty I read NYLON and Vogue voraciously; at that time, I had the dream of being a fashion designer and I think that has influenced my way of seeing and making objects. I believe that art is the luxury object par excellence, and it is important for me to be in dialogue not only with high fashion luxury objects, but also with their advertising, window displays and shops that create the ideal environment for anything to become an object of desire. The cruelty with which this industry has taught us to desire things as a status symbol is not so different from what happens in the art market as a symbol of cultural and social capital. For me, high fashion and art occupy a Freudian ambivalence; in which they occupy simultaneous love and hate since they represent a very seductive beauty and ostentatiousness at the expense of oppressive and violent ecosystems. It is a constant and paradoxical exercise of being critical of my own fetishes (art included).

RCC: In what women from real life do you get inspiration from in order to make your creations?  yourself, your relatives, friends, historical figures…?

NC: The historical character that has inspired me the most and that I have had the need to study lately is María Magdalena. I have always been very moved by the images of virgins because I feel that they are female bodies kidnapped to illustrate an ideology. My curiosity about Mary Magdalene was born when I saw a representation of her in which her entire body, except for her face, breasts, hands and feet, was covered with hair, as if she were an animal. I did not understand how the history of this woman had to have been distorted to justify that iconography. The mutation of the body of María Magdalena, lined with hair, corresponds to the mutation of the story of the same character, always adapting her to the stereotype of the perverse woman du jour. Although these iconographies of denigration feed gender roles that are still in force, I feel very attracted by the poetry of the decisions of each of these representations. I want to think that this almost interspecies mutation of the animal woman can lead us to powerful anatomical hopes, where animality is not a sign of shame, but of ferocity.

On the other hand, I like to think that Eva Hesse and Francesca Woodman are my best platonic friends, who accompany me and nourish my processes with faith. I believe that both (Hesse in her early phantasmagorical self-portraits and her latex paintings) managed to make the body a specter announced from the ultra-corporality, raising the female body to another axis, or bringing these bodies from dark portals so that they ephemerally inhabit our land. I believe that the affinity, affection and inspiration that you can have for another person transcends contemporaneity, or rather, that contemporaneity is more about inhabiting ideas and emotions than sharing time.