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Orlan before Orlan
For the first time, Orlan's paintings, serigraphs and collages series are compiled in a catalog on the occasion of an unprecedented exhibition. These works she made when she was young are very different from her current work, and they remind us that Orlan's work also began with painting.
[...] One might also be tempted to see in these pictures' assemblages of geometrical shapes the inside of La Mettrie's fleshless « body-machine », re-examined through the lens of Picabia's mechanisms and Duchamp's solitary machines. Supports/Surfaces may have played a part in providing Orlan with an argument to recuse the primacy they were given as an avant-garde in the art world. She contrasted their free, creased, and floating canvases with hard, industrial, non-« artistic » supports devoid of any of the intrinsic denotations, connotations and significations that the canvas usually carries, thus enhancing the brilliance of the enameled color and the increased reification of object-paintings which can therefore almost be categorized as sculptures. In this case, a backing is added to the painting. The paint becomes more than the stain that Benjamin described it as. I might also add that each of these paintings, like some of Duchamp's works, includes a system of levels and networks in its areas of flat color, so much so that it is not the painting of its time that comes to mind, but rather of the yet-to-come works of Peter Halley.
