Masks and Faces.
Vernissage Saturday 1 December 2007
14 hours opening!
from Saturday 1st December 2007 14.00 to Sunday 2nd December 2007 19.00!
(Preview 29 November 2007 19.00)
River Dillon
29 November to 22 December 2007
Aqua Galerie
Lobeckstrasse 30
10969 Berlin Kreuzberg
U Moritzplatz
http://aquagalerie.blogspot.com
Masks serve to hide. Pleasure lacks in the mystery on his identity and the surprise of the unveiling. But to wear a mask dosn't stop to show a fragment of his own reality, hair go beyond the mask and a flow of red curls can exceed a wolf's mask. Like the black veils of empress Elizabeth of Austria allowed her to keep her mystery, the angelic face of a model, Vincent, tranformed in a mermaid, appears through the scales of a fish.
River Dillon often creates Maskmen from nature's elements that posess anthropomorphic forms. The goal of these special masks is not to hide but to metamorphose the faces'fragments: Gurshad lashes with green seaweed eyelashes. Jean winks his eye shell.
These creatures of the sea, temptress sirenas with poisonous strange charms are men who adopt feminine weapons to seduce: veils, fake eyelashes, artificially swollen and pulpy lips.
The masks have also been invented to embody our dreams and eternal myths. Every civilization create mask to become an animal, another person, a magician, a chaman, a priest or a god.
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River Dillon has received the authorization of Musée du Quai Branly to photograph the most beautiful African, American, Asiatic and Oceanic masks in French public collections. These inanimated masks have been superimposed with human faces and become alive. The combination between a mask and a human face gives a hieratic sculpture, a sculpted and painted man. A sery that River Dillon baptized Maskmen.
In the Musée du Quai Branly and in a private collection, River Dillon also photographed ceremony clothes in feathers from Nazca civilization, from about the beginning of the Christian era, 2000 years ago.
In ancient Perou, with these costumes, the Nazca transform themselves in Birdmen to get closer to the gods, the Aztec disguise in Snakemen to acquire the subtility of reptilian battle tactics. Originally, Masks have been invented so that chamans and pagan priests embody gods during religious ceremonies. River Dillon's Birdmen are realized superposing faces with ceremonial feather Inca and Amazonian clothes. So that human skin transforms in feathers.
To wear colored feathers multiplies seduction power. The viewer is attracted by the models who display a fan of multicolor finery. With his masks, River Dillon trandforms his models in dream creatures, like every artist magnify his muse in a fantasy object. To put a mask to his model is a metaphore for art and artistic creation. The Insectmen of River Dillon transcend reality: the Butterflyman will embody ephemeral youth's fragility, or his Spidermen the violence of predatory homosexual desire.
Some masked portraits look like Oriane de Guermantes or a Proustian princess, grabing a shell like a ball mask, on a backround of red 1900 velvet cushions.
River Dillon proposes to his models an ephemeral dream: to reinvent oneself during a photoshoot.
During a maskball, the mask that you choose reveals your true personality.
To live happy, live masked.
Denis Angus et Edouard Solair
Aqua Galerie
Lobeckstr. 30-35
Kreuzberg
U Moritzplatz
http://aquagalerie.blogspot.com
contact aqua galerie aquagalerie@gmail.de
contact artist River Dillon:artriverdillon@hotmail.com
more info on river dillon: http://riverdillon.blogspot.com..........and........http://www.riverdillon.com
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Image:
Maskman. Homme-masque N°1. Jérôme with Hemba mask. Jérôme au masque Hemba. Superposition with Masque Heaume anthropomorphe. Population Suku. Congo. Début XXème siècle. Musée du Quai Branly
