WOTY 2.5: Raúl
Raúl
By Camille Rouzaud
Curated by Natalia Viera Salgado
Word of the Year 2.5: Raúl is a project by French artist Camille Rouzaud. Raúl is a series of four printed photos on canvas and small concrete and glass sculptures. The printed images are stills extracted from a 2015 documentation video shot inside an apartment building in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the artist Camille Rouzaud lived and established a friendship relationship with a teenage named Raúl.
Rouzaud is interested in capturing the performativity and energy that the corporeal body carry with each of us. Through incorporating sculptural materials such as concrete, glass, wood and stone, she emphasizes the emotional weight of her subjects. Rouzaud is interested in the complexity of human existence: investigating how individuals interact with one another and exploring limitations of freedom among peers and family units. Much like the people she portrays, her work is in constant flux. Through this motion of making fixed objects, she creates a time capsule that celebrates personal histories, ethnicities, complexities rather than generalizations and linear narratives.
Artist Statement:
“The capacity for resistance, as a teenager, fascinates me. When your environment isn’t easy, you just have this unconscious strength coming out of you without even realizing it, without knowing anything else. That’s how you get through the tough times. In a raw or more poetic way, the freedom, a defiant look, the intimacy, the identity into/of the diversity, the courage, the sweetness linked to the violence are what I’m looking for in all of my work. My own capacity of resistance when I was a young teenager and my own capacity here as an artist.”
- Camille Rouzaud
Camille Rouzaud (b.1986 in Narbonne, France) is an artist living and working in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions: DIAGONAL, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2018, LAPAIX in PARIS, 2018. Selected group exhibitions: IMPLOSION: FRAGMENTOS Y POSSIBILIDADES, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2018, FORGOTTEN LANDS, Brooklyn, New York, 2017, THE HOUSE OF BLAHBLAH, Middlesbrough, England, 2017, HIDRANTE, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2017, among others.
Natalia Viera Salgado (Puerto Rico and New York) is an independent curator and archivist in charge of the Art Program at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO), Hunter College, New York and junior assistant to the Director at El Museo del Barrio, New York. Her curatorial practice focuses on the intersections between historical and archive material snd pedagogy. Her inclination to social issues, decolonial and environmental theories in relation to contemporary art has led her to work with many artists from Latin America and the Caribbean.