Régine Thill explores the representation of the female body. His paintings are rarely self-portraits but their evolution is eminently autobiographical. They question the contradictions that surround the image of women today (and mainly their own), torn between feminism or neo-feminism and affirmation, exhibition of femininity.
It represents naked women’s bodies most often or with certain female attributes; these bodies merge into each other, mingle, conjugate, interpenetrate, juxtapose, superimpose, telescope and stack each other....These images of bodies come from multiple sources: the female press, even male, Instagram (a real breeding ground), sometimes with the great masters, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Michel -ange...... She draws them, re-draws them, fragments them, distorts them and combines them in many ways to form women’s interlacing. These jumble of bodies may appear as scenes of orgies, but are in fact "landscapes of flesh". They evoke bodies struggling in an "in-between", oscillating between the desire to assume their singularity, to claim their imperfections, their defects, their wounds, their sufferings and the submission to society’s injunctions to perfection, to unattainable criteria of beauty.
Régine Thill’s paintings mix "naked" and "naked" (1): the "nakedness" associated with embarrassment, the embarrassment felt by the helpless body of her clothes, fragile, defenceless and the "nakedness" evoking self-confidence, the body flourishing, triumphant, balanced, dominant, proud. Each painting is like a braid or a weave: several "strands" passing sometimes above, sometimes below and which question in their points of intersection, the contradictions and ambiguity of the image of the female body.
(1): She borrows the distinction between the two terms from art historian Kenneth Clark.
