With “Nudity never gets to a point that I no longer touch you naked with my gaze“, poet Hugo Claus vulnerably condensed tenderness and aggression into one perfectly composed sentence. Griet Troch’s artworks harbour the same gripping and clenched autobiographical honesty in one silent image. Although the protagonist is man in all his inadequacy the artist does not directly seek a (self)portrait. She explores a diversity of emotions, during a fundamental ensemble of model and creator, until the boundary between the two roles disappears. Matter and medium are subordinate to the movements of mind to be captured, leading to a multifaceted oeuvre. Wax, concrete, plaster, marble, latex, silicone, photography, video art, 3D printing, and installation art are used multidisciplinary as different perspectives, viewing- and feeling-options as it were, to observe and relive affects. Tactile, Troch intimately and candidly kneads, welds, photographs, moulds, pours and sculpts snapshots or life stages from her core to the outside world. With deep body awareness, she scratches away the thin layer of socialisation and self-control to capture primal feelings and give them new life in tender images. Razor-sharp she fillets physicality until all that remains is radical poetry, pure emotion, and disembodied reality. Her fascination with the physical and energetic translation of the expression of urges and feelings gives the artworks a suspense akin to classical sculpture and Baroque compositions. However, the current use of Drapery loses the erotic effect of simultaneously concealing and exposing to the power of the profound ‘naked emotion’. Troch’s nudes expose an intimacy that goes far beyond the skin. Her authentic gaze pierces through the flesh and touches straight to the heart.
