Throughout the course of various experiences, Katia Favodon has taken a keen interest in childhoodtales and wonder, beyond worlds that seem poetic, delicious and magical at first sight. She wanted to focus on something more disquieting, on something thornier, darker. This ambivalence is anabiding feature of her work.
In the 'Barbe à papa' installation (meaning literally 'Daddy's beard' and figuratively 'Cotton candy' in French) Katia Favodon works on a locations ambiance,playing with perception and pure sensation. All these appealing,distorted, oppressive elements progressively become deceitful, poisonous, and dangerous...the cotton-candy padded cell, the sharp steel rose, the thermal blankets strewn all over the floor, thebuzz of bees, the smell of strawberries annoy and suffocate us.
Attraction deflects, deceives and simulates... somewhere between illusion and frustration... seeming sweetness... seeming beauty. This realm of dreams, with its ability to turn suddenly into a nightmare, parallels life the way fairy tales expresstruths children can't quite express. (cf. Bettelheim). The fantastic element isdefinitely not a way to flee to a haven of innocence and sweetness, it rather evokes fearsand inner conflicts in shapes that are different from those they usually assume.
Katia Favodon uses space and plays with proportion in order to question our perception of things...(cf. 'Alice in Wonderland’: the girl becomes so small she ends up swimming in her own tears) In her video entitled 'Les automates' ('The Robots') the visual artist still drawson the childhood imagination and on popular culture to affect us on a deeper level. The robot reminds us ofour childhood and the toys we played with, never the less it is an object destined only to be seen as a futuristic freak an empty soulless mass of metal. These frightening, crazy robots, confined in loneliness, thrust into a never-ending state of nervous strain by the repetition, the jerky moves and the screeching noises, are possibly onereflection of our own lives.
J'avais complètement oublié que tu n'aimais pas les chats!' ('I had totally forgotten thatyou don't like cats!') - this ambiguous, ironic title foreshadows, questions, suggests, feeds thethought... sweet and cruel at the same time.In a mocking tone, Katia Favodon converts the Hello Kitty character into a bedside rug 'This tinylittle cat, so cute and so pure' dismembered by a consumer society that corrupts everything.
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