Penetration (Pénétration), 1993-94. Installation view, artist's studio, Malakoff, France, 1994. Fifty sewn and stuffed fabric elements, and angora yarn. Collection the artist and Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne. Details below.

A completely different space is evoked in the installation work Penetration. Messager has sewn shapes from brightly colored fabric and stuffed them to resemble human internal organs. Hanging from slight, soft-pink angora yarns in a dense grouping, the forms create a floating forest of anatomical parts.

Far from gruesome, the piece suggests a three-dimensional anatomical model, with its separate elements and colors not taken from reality but from medical illustration. In fact, much like My Works, Penetration has a diagrammatic quality, and maintains conceptual distance from its ostensible subject.

It provides a compelling visual feast that does not connect with the reality of the body's internal functions: gaily colored organs hang in clusters, and shapes repeat in a random way, much like the isolated body parts in Messager's dense My Vows pieces. The work remains a distinctly visual and cerebral experience: a conceptualization of the body rather than the body itself, a view of ourselves that we know not from any real familiarity but from visual diagrams that have been derived from scientific research and consensus.

           Penetration - 49K JPEG

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