Sandra Zeenni's recent sculptures bear witness to the renewal of her dialogue, which she has been engaged in for several years with Rodin.
This conversation with the sculptor's expressionist work is now marked by the desire to go beyond an eroticized female body, sensualized by the male gaze, such as Camille Claudel's lover had implemented it, and more broadly such as it has often been represented throughout the history of art.
From this point of view, Germaine Richier is, for Sandra Zeenni, one of the artists who most brilliantly succeeds in this surpassing by relieving her sculptures depicting female bodies of a masculine filter that has become conventional and repetitive. According to this reading, Germaine Richier inscribes her bodies of the forties and fifties not only in the devastated universe of the immediate post-war period and in the force of Nature whose vocabulary she uses, but also in opposition to the patriarchal society of the time and its assigned roles.
Far from the beaten track, Sandra Zeenni's technical and creative journey significantly prefigures her latest pieces.
Like many of her more or less distant predecessors, Sandra Zeenni began her artistic career in what was commonly called "applied arts" or "decorative arts".
In her own way, she bounces back from this reserved field to transform and divert it. She evolves her practice of ceramics towards sculpture by subverting its codes. Some pieces made without drawing are sketched using small-scale models; she abandons the enameling of her white round-bosses by obtaining a matte material that is similar to plaster and exposes the bodies. She shifts her black volumes towards sculptural bronze, where the glaze applied with a brush comes from a gesture close to painting. Her sculpture solicits the viewer and encourages them to a tactile approach for a polysensory encounter.
Her sculptures evoke the opening of a female body devoted to pleasure as well as assaults and intrusions. Direct contact with the pieces gives rise to the surprise effects triggered by the succession of viewing angles:
- a single body versus two intertwined or fusional bodies,
- a body revealing its joints and spine versus a series of mutant forms that proliferate like rhizomes,
- a bumpy, hollowed and perforated surface with troubled resonances versus a white and sublimated matter.