Amazons, Rebels and Mutants (2014)

This corpus of portraits of women artists concludes a cycle in which I focused on the figure of the warrior as cultural resistant. Here the artists are identified for their respective practices, which present, more or less openly, attitudes or strategies of resistance and engagement.

Preface by Ève Lamoureux, excerpt

“Quintas proposes a mixture between references to self and references to the social world, between her personal influences and women’s collective issues, between the artistic and activist careers of unique women and sociocultural representations linked to women, on the one hand, and to engaged people, on the other hand – thus highlighting the central idea that the personal is political. She offers us portraits that combine critical content and pictorial innovation, in which we glimpse her affinity and complicity with her “models,” subjects who are active in the world into which they are integrated and in the very process of their portrayal. The women here are not objectified, made into things; if codes and schemes, especially stereotypes, are evoked, it is in order to unveil, reformulate, and subvert them. And this is one of the political powers of art: to use artistic and cultural codes as a playground. ”

Letter to my rebellious and mutant friends, Michel Lefebvre, fragments

Women of heart and women of mind,
you are all fierce
alive and activist, invigorated and muscular
anembarrassed and affirmed,
stubborn and even insolent
Chipping away at the territory of man
shaking on his pedestal
Brandishing freedom, equality, recognition, and difference as the fundaments of authenticity
Fierce battlers of the war of the sexes
fighting for the affirmative
The yes, I can if and only if I want to