Femmes Fatales at Bund18

Miss Van, Twinkles 4. Courtesy Galerie Magda Danysz

A bevy of beautiful women have descended on 18Gallery. Seductive as they are, though, don't expect any sparkling conversation – these leading ladies are the cast of renowned French artist, Miss Van's current exhibition, Twinkles.

Miss Van came to prominence in the mid 1990s as one of the first female graffiti artists, unusually employing acrylic and brushes as her medium of choice. Pouty pin-ups began gracing the walls of both her native Toulouse, then adopted home of Barcelona. Her characters got noticed, and she was soon invited to display her work indoors at galleries in the States, Europe and now China. This shifting of milieus – street to gallery – inevitably evolved the artist's work, and allowed her to experiment with media too subtle for the streets – the exhibition's pencil drawings, for example, are particularly striking. Her paintings now sell for several thousands of US dollars, and her instantly recognizable ladies can now be found on posters, t-shirts, badges and all manner of paraphernalia.

Over the past decade the characters she creates have grown up from cute little girls, through to sirens, femme fatales, seriously sexy women. "I think you can really see the evolution [in my work] when you look back to years ago, but I'm evolving at the same time as my painting. My artistic life is very close to my personal life and I'm not thinking so much about how to evolve, I'm just doing it, and the paintings are changing the way I'm changing too, it's a normal evolution. I grew up and the paintings look more mature, as do I".

The artist exclusively paints women, or rather fantasies and dreams involving a certain type of woman. Does she feel limited, I wonder, by this precedence? Would she ever paint men, for example? "No, femininity has always been my subject and as a woman, it's a subject I know better. I don't have sensitivity in an aesthetic way to paint guys. My paintings are maybe a little bit erotic but not vulgar; I like to express femininity in many ways. I wanted to have all the girls naked with a black body on the black background then it's softer, with the light coming from the darkness. I like to mix it with ugly animals, they're quite rough, to have the ambiguity between the sophisticated and the raw".

Animals and animal imagery features strongly in the show, adding a slightly disturbing, surreal, Magritte-esque tone to the collection. These references range from animal masks, pigs, birds and monkeys alongside the characters, right through to strange, hybrid creatures – one particularly rich painting, all gold and ochre hues, features a woman with an eagle's head; another has yappy-looking foxes for breasts.


Miss Van, Twinkles 8; 12. Courtesy Galerie Magda Danysz

"I paint animals to add a masculine element to my paintings. Animals are part of my life, I've used them in my work for a long time, and then I started to work on masks, then animal masks and then animal faces on the girls, mixing the animals with the humans and making another being. I think we all have different faces - we don't have just one feeling - so I'm trying to express the confusion and different feelings that I sometimes experience. I don't want just nice images to put on your wall - I'm trying to go deeper with my feelings and to express things that I have inside and try to give people dreams and fantasies."

She clearly and inevitably gets asked about those street artist days a little too frequently for her liking, but reminisces, nonetheless about what those times were like, and whether her work lost or gained anything in moving from outside to inside, from semi-legitimate to conventional spaces. "It's all part of my process. [Painting on the street] was a nice way to express myself spontaneously and I always had some nice experiences with people and stories to tell. Painting in my studio is all about experimenting with different techniques and taking time to do things without the rush of the street and with no one looking at me. Working in my studio allows me to evolve a lot more and to do my painting properly, without the pressure of the street. The street was really fun. I've spent a lot of years painting outside, that was really good, and it was a good exercise to paint quickly but then I had to change and to do something else. It's part of me, I'm a painter, whether I'm painting on the street or in my studio, it's just the same. I'm the same person. I miss [the spontaneity] but I've learned some other things too – maturity and more control, consciousness, many things that I didn't have before."


Miss Van, Twinkles 2; Mascaras 9. Courtesy Galerie Magda Danysz

So what of her creative process now? Are the pencil drawings featured in the exhibition future paintings-in-waiting? "No, I'm painting almost directly on the canvas, I don't have sketches, I don't sketch a lot I prefer to paint directly with rich colours. The few drawings here are not from paintings". The colours are certainly beautiful – evocative of some 1930s jazz club, all red banquettes and smoky shadows, the girls' white faces coquettishly perched on dark, voluptuous bodies.

The Twinkles exhibition is a people-pleaser: it's enjoyable although some of the paintings go little beyond sophisticated eye candy. It is the darker works, those laden with curious and compelling animal imagery that really pique the viewers' interest. These half-creatures, half-women – sirens, perhaps – appear as if from some dimly-lit dream, the paintings themselves acting as a portal through which us voyeurs are coaxed into taking a peep.

The exhibition continues until 16 January 2011 at Bund18 Gallery, 4/F, Bund 18, 18 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu
For more information about Miss Van, take a look at her website here