On Beauty
Claudia Huidobro’s Questioning Art
By Preeti Zachariah
The former supermodel Claudia Huidobro remembers her formal induction into the cult of beauty. “Before I became a model, I used to skateboard, do boyish things,” says Huidobro, whose standard bio describes her as “muse to Jean Paul Gaultier as well as some of the greatest fashion photographers of her generation.” Then at 16, she participated for the first time in a fashion show. “They did my makeup in front of a mirror. I looked at myself and wondered if it was me,” she recalls.
Today, several decades later, there’s no question of not recognizing herself when she looks at her reflection: She sees an artist. A photographer, visual and performance artist, Huidobro makes work that comments on the feminine beauty ideal. Her recent installation of photos and collages, Faite Main (Hand Made), which was recently showcased at the FIAF Gallery as part the Crossing the Line festival, featured images of lipsticks, brushes, scalpels, and other implements for enhancing one’s appearance, in prints pasted to the gallery walls. Some pieces displayed images of parts of her own body — arms, legs, torso — floating in a shadowy background.
“You may say that since she left the fashion world, where she was both a model and a designer, and decided to be an artist she has been investigating the issue of beauty,” says her partner, François Hébel, curator of the exhibit.
Huidobro had pursued art as a youngster. “I studied art in school,” she says, “and then modeling happened.” Still, when she posed for photographers like Helmut Newton, Steven Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, and William Klein, she played a creative role. “She always said that they were making the picture together. That she had to understand what he was looking for,” says Hébel.
Huidobro quit modelling in the 1990’s to focus on her art career, but by her own account, it took some time for her to find her voice and her form. At first, she says, “I did not allow myself to say anything.” Then, in 2008, she met fashion curator and historian Olivier Saillard.
She began working with him on performance pieces that commented on the state of the fashion world: Dress Like a Man (2011), which re-imagined traditional menswear into women’s; Models at Work (2012), which explored the relationship between the models and the clothes they wore; and Fashion in Motion (2012), which investigated how the gestures and poses of models had evolved over the years. The latest, Models Never Talk — in which former supermodels recounted their experiences of working with famous designers — was part of Crossing the Lines in 2014.
All these projects got Huidobro thinking about her own life and about the peddling of beauty and femininity — “because being a model is all that: You sell your dreams in a silent way through images.”
In her art, she began to unpack that process. For instance, her photo collage series, Quoi De Plus Douce, features a number of nude pin-up models whose faces and bodies have been stippled, segmented or obscured. One artwork portrays two female silhouettes facing each other, bound together by a single word — “Nobody” — as if these two pinup models have been stripped of all agency, and reduced by the male gaze to face and breasts and buttocks.
Huidobro claims to be a chronicler rather than a critic. “I just wanted to say that there should not be a single standard of beauty,” she remarks. “There are many beauties in the world and that is what makes it rich.”
