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Cariatide — Between Strength and Lightness

With Cariatide, Valérie Hadida takes her sculptural practice to a new level. Standing nearly two metres tall, it is the largest work the artist has created to date. Its almost monumental scale gives her female figure a new presence, while retaining the sensitivity and poetry that define her artistic world.
The sculpture echoes La Pluie, an earlier work in which a young woman sheltered herself in a similar pose. Here, however, the gesture takes on a whole new dimension. Standing tall and slender, her arms raised, the figure seems at once to carry, support and protect herself.
The title Cariatide refers directly to the sculpted female figures that replaced columns and pillars in ancient architecture, supporting the weight of a building. Valérie Hadida draws on this reference and reinterprets it through her own artistic language. Her Cariatide does not bear a stone monument: above her head, she holds aloft a light, almost floating form that might suggest a shelter, a wing or a sail.
Contrast lies at the heart of the work: the strength of bronze and the apparent fragility of the figure, weight and lightness, groundedness and elevation. Firmly rooted to the ground, the young woman reaches towards the sky. Her body becomes architecture in itself, a link between the earth and that which lies beyond it.
With Cariatide, Valérie Hadida thus lends monumental scale to one of the recurring figures in her work: a woman who may appear fragile, yet never truly is. A woman capable of carrying and enduring, but also of transforming what she carries into a space of freedom.