“Monday” by Frédérique Daubal
When I look at Frédérique Daubal's photographs, my imagination creates a fictitious scenario: a creative, intelligent, perhaps bored? incensed? woman sits at her kitchen table in a sunlit apartment in Paris going through this months magazines in a stolen moment of free time. Using materials readily at hand - the compost from last nights dinner, materials from her children's current arts and crafts projects, she interacts with the style dictates in front of her to create a playful, DIY vision all her own.
The work of Frédérique Daubal gives us one artists considered response to the decrees of contemporary fashion and beauty. Very much of the moment, where media consumption has shifted from monologue to dialogue, these images allow us to question and challenge standards put forward in fashion editorials and advertising. As we are drawn from passive consumption into a world of co-creation, we are permitted to reclaim the conversation around those norms and forced to reconsider our own concepts of what is attractive or arresting.
Frédérique Daubal’s training began in graphic design. Constantly challenging the definition of that field, she has explored a variety of creative roles throughout her career. Currently living in Paris after Montreal, London and Amsterdam, Daubal works as a visual artist, graphic and textile designer. Her conceptual work is infused with humor and irony, and through the use of craft and recycled materials she references the immediacy of daily life and the possibility to find fantasy within. Attached to the concept of the mask, in both her “Hide and Seek” and “Overprint” series, Daubal hides faces, thus leaving us free to imagine what is happening beneath.
“Frédérique Daubal, mishandles the image of glossypaper, kneading, pressing, triturating, brings out the monster, the schoolkid, the primitive. She dissects the icon, exposes its hidden, organic part, with a false playful insouciance, which leaves us destabilized, uncomfortable, but a little more real.”
Pierre Erwan Guillaume - screenwriter, director