Patou Soult
Patou, a French UK resident since 1990 is a self-taught artist. She was originally inspired by her first years as a full time life model at the Slade and privately, though she always had a streak for relating to the world creatively as a touring and recording musician. In 1991, she felt an irresistible pull towards visual arts and felt it might give her the capacity to make coherent patterns between her life and the inner fantasy world she espouses.
Her own knowledge of the body through martial arts and yoga provided much of the blue print for her disparate pieces and her own bisexuality and fascination with the occult gave her the impetus to explore with different medium and representations, from fierce carnal goddess to sex slave.
"What I find arousing is the unsettling blend of the nude with the mutant form, it's like an ode to the unpredictability of evolutionary cycles. Whether it is by adding limbs, animal parts or merging toddler faces with fully developed bodies ready to mate. I also want to express the sexually-charged female, subtly beckoning yet never quite available but displayed for wantonness and fantasy, never depicting the actual act."
Patou's sculptures, by contrast, appear to show painfully athletic contortions (almost like caricatures of ballet dancers), their engorged sexuality awakens the kind of appreciative tactile lust, they are designed to be touched and explored. The erotic speaks through their apparent submissiveness yet they ooze colossal strength, reminiscent of the Scythian amazons of old. They are executed with the bare hands, like a consumptive and ritualistic intercourse. They consist of nylon reinforced clay, coated with mixes of paint and metallic pigments and weight around 5 kilos a piece.
The drawings on watercolor paper are washed with oak gall and rhubarb root powders or elderberry juice. Oils are on recycled antique linen or wooden board.
Arcane symbolism and the esoteric lurk in her works and metaphorical inclusions of satyrs, sphinxes and chimeras add a playful sense of perversion.
"My experience of the craft is intermittent, organic, spellbound and unpresuming."
"Pullit 6" exhibition at the Cooltan Gallery, Effra Rd, Brixton, 1991
Regular Sculptures displays at Skin 2, Libido, 'Sh' and The Hoxton Gallery, London, from 1994 to 1997
'Community dolls' collective installation for Lisa Ducie Exhibition, Brighton, 1999
"Autumn show" at La Maison des Artistes, N7 London, 2007
Copyright Patou Soult © 2008
