Beccari Priscilla

• Born in 1986, Belgium
• Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Priscilla Beccari’s work is something one grows into slowly, through images, actions, and forms that all echo one another or foreshadow something else. This ever-shifting universe multiplies stylistic breaks and registers, situating itself at the crossroads of a predatory eroticism, a yellow-vest feminism, and a sense of the absurd tinged with a hint of dread. It speaks of domestic enclosures and animality, of suitcase-women and inanimate bodies, of collapses and cheekiness.
Drawing is the epicenter of her practice, but her work should not be reduced to that alone. More fundamentally perhaps, it inscribes itself within a tradition that, from Louise Bourgeois to Kiki Smith, makes the body a support that is as phantasmagorical as it is political.
The large-format drawings construct architectures rather than simply staging them. The paper stretches or is patched together depending on the degree of vertigo desired: perspectives twist, surfaces blur. The elasticity of the spaces and the breadth of emptiness feed a feeling of isolation and solitude. Solitary bodies, lovers, or the bestiary reappear in drawings or monotypes of more modest dimensions. Here, the play on perspective is less present, giving way to an even sharper radicality. One thinks of the fraying woman, the child in the fridge, mom says I’m a bad girl… Titles act as signatures and are sometimes integrated directly into the drawing. Here again, the home is the site of alienation, food evokes death, desire inflicts torment.
Opposed to this figure of willing submission is that of the monster, the animal. Emancipation here is not gentle: it crumples, scratches, devours. Perhaps it is only a fantasy, an impossibility. Perhaps bodies will remain folded, stored away, threatened, and subjugated… Yet Priscilla Beccari’s work does not lead to this dead end. Rather, it suggests—however desperately—that something in us still resists.