Whether or not the kinds recommend straightforwardly constrained solitary intercourse kinds or androgynous, blended areas of the body, every thing in Paradox of Pleasure speaks if you ask me for the radical human anatomy politics of cyberpunk energy, intercourse, and physical violence.
That churning anima of desire places it along with H.R. Giger’s famous 1973 artwork Penis Landscape (aka “Work 219: Landscape XX”). But unlike Giger’s alien visual, Fernandez’s accomplishment is a reinvention of romanticism, where in fact the performative in addition to seem that is ingenious connected. A lot more to the level, Fernandez’s foreboding paintings share in the sliced body aesthetics well-liked by Robert Gober and Paul Thek, specially Thek’s technical Reliquaries show, which include Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box” (1965). Such as these designers, Fernandez generally seems to take pleasure in an inventiveness which can be morally negligent, gnarly, brooding, unfortunate, eccentric, and emotionally going in a way that is maddeningly hard to explain without mentioning cold brutality. It is really not for absolutely nothing any particular one of their paintings, “Développement d’un délire” (growth of a delusion,” 1961) that is maybe maybe not in this show had been showcased within the 1980 Brian de Palma film Dressed to destroy (a movie beloved by particular performers for the Metropolitan Museum of Art scene, lushly scored by Pino Donaggio).
Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (1997), oil on canvas, 103 x 132 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Daniel Pype) Agustin Fernandez, “Le Roi et la Reine” (“The King and also the Queen,” 1960), drawing in some recoverable format, 175 x 122 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; photo by Farzad Owrang)
Aesthetically, Fernandez’s paintings of armored, pansexual closeness develop a vivid psycho geography that may be a bit lumbering in quite similar method as Wifredo Lam’s, Roberto Matta’s, and André Masson’s mystical paintings. Nonetheless, this might be something which Fernandez’s drawings, like “Le Roi et la Reine” (“The King therefore the Queen,”1960) which calls in your thoughts Marcel Duchamp’s famous artwork “Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites” (“The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes,” 1912) have the ability to avoid.
However in both mediums, in addition to in their collages (like the startling “Malcom X” from 1982), you will find complicated identifications going on that blur organic with inorganic kinds.
Duchamp first made mention of the the device célibataire (bachelor machine) apparatus in a 1913 note printed in planning for his piece “La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” (“The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” 1915–23), which accentuates psychological devices that really work away regarding the imaginary, deconstructing the Hegelian tradition of intimate distinction founded being a dialectical and natural opposition of masculine and feminine. Fernandez’s enigmatic intercourse device bondage, which probes the shameless vagaries of individual desire with Duchampian panache, is an indirect outgrowth for the arrière garde, male dominant French Surrealist preferences demonstrated into the 1959 Eros event arranged by André Breton and Duchamp in Paris. But it addittionally implies an even more modern, tautly eroticized and virtualized flesh that banking institutions for a hyper sexed, electronic corporeality this is certainly synthetic, bionic, and prosthetic essentially an updated expansion of this re territorialization of body, identification, and appearance depicted early when you look at the feverish cyborg looks of Oskar Schlemmer and Fernand Léger.
As perversely droll and symptomatic I could not help but also view the nasty permissiveness of Paradox of Pleasure in the bright light of artistic misogyny that shines from Kate Millett’s seminal 1970 study Sexual Politics through to today’s #TimesUp movement as it is to experience the rhapsody of Fernandez’s loveless and lopsided sadomasochistic cybernetic pleasures playing within the male mystique. In their many alluring compositions, Fernandez imagines the effective castration associated with the privileged male musician in relationship to your manipulated feminine human anatomy. Therein lies the paradox that is pleasurable. Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (1976), drawing written down, 74 x 56 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Farzad Owrang) Agustin Fernandez, “Malcom X” (1982), collage, 91.7 cm x 64.5 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Daniel Pype)
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