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—Ava Brodsky de Gouttes constructs landscapes of desire and weaves narratives of melancholy in her photographs. A woman exposes her shoulder as she flees from her incognito lover. Another bares her legs as her stiletto heels ascend the staircase in haste. While Brodsky de Gouttes chases and captures eroticism through anonymity, her black-and-white still life images confess to familiar abandonment and poetic violence. A discarded cloth interrupts the elegant rhythm of balusters; the disheveled sheet that of the rusty bed rails. Blinds are blades that diagonally dismember the female nude; charcoal marks of tires like a nightmare to a city street's slumbering snow.
Brodsky de Gouttes's photographs are unquiet performances of contrived distortions, ambiguous accidents and apocalyptic solitude. One hears the echoes of a soul tormented by memories of an inferno to come. Akin to a Greek tragedy, a chorus of abandoned wooden chairs and wine bottles expresses emptiness and excess. There is a woman's cascading red hair, soft and unforgettable like a secret whisper. Even the hypnotic silence of turquoise paint peeling off a wall is as deafening as discarded beer cans being recycled.
Past the constraints of the grain and corresponding light and shadows, the putrefied scent of fish liver invades one's nose, the rear view mirror witnesses the wild grass' attempts to kiss the sky, and the cold rain lingers on the windowpane like a burning tear in a prolonged goodbye. Indeed, Brodsky de Gouttes draws from veritas, but she tells with nostalgia what lies within and beyond this grand illusion with such realism and force unmasked only in the tradition of the vanitas.
A nocturnal voyeur, Ava Brodsky de Gouttes lives and works in Paris. In 1997, she served as an assistant to Joël-Peter Witkin. Inspired by intimate subjects and travels in France, Colombia, Ireland, Slovakia and the United States, Brodsky de Gouttes's photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows held at the Palais Royal, Palais de Tokyo, Salon Daguerre, Salon d’Art Contemporain de Montrouge, and other local and international venues.
Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut , Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Art History
California State University San Bernardino
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