The belated Cuban musician Agustin Fernandez created a gloomy, gritty human anatomy of works that imagine a hyper sexed, electronic corporeality.
PARIS A visceral, hyper sexualized sensibility operates through the extravagantly fashionable oeuvre of Cuban musician Agustin Fernandez, whom resided right right here from 1959 to 1968 and passed away in nyc in 2006. The effectiveness of plucky erotic dreams and intimate innuendos, Fernandez’s leitmotif, usually supersedes respectful significance that is social so one runetki part of Fernandez’s inventive art is forever likely to be libertine, even if tempered by our knowing that the dominance regarding the right western male position isn’t any longer unquestioned in art. Gender is socially ( maybe perhaps not naturally) constructed and, when thought to be a fluid concept in art, defies recognition that is easy. Needless to state, there is nothing less particular in art than sex, and although irreverent works like Yoko Ono’s cheeky film “Four” (1966), Valie Export’s “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1969), Kembra Pfahler’s “Wall of Vagina” (2011), and Betty Tompkins’s Fuck Paintings may suggest otherwise, a lot of women feel there will be something deeply feckless, or even downright alienating, about decreasing the human anatomy to its remote intercourse components. Not too in Paradoxe de la Jouissance (“Paradox of Pleasure”), the chutzpah stuffed exhibition of Fernandez’s controversial late work insightfully curated by Jeanette Zwingenberger at the town hallway of Paris’s arrondissement that is fourth.
Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (1998), oil on canvas, 94 x 144 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Daniel Pype)
Art historically, Fernandez’s slightly sadomasochistic and semi that is obsessively erotic paintings of constrained human anatomy components squeeze into the context of mannerist (or decadent) belated Surrealism, which delighted in degradation by interpreting it as a work of alchemical transmutation delivering transgressive freedom from puritanical imposition. Used because of the second time Surrealists, Fernandez showed with Francis Picabia at Galerie FuМ€rstenberg in 1965 along with Yves Tanguy, Salvador DalГ, Hans Bellmer, and Pierre Roy at Galerie AndrГ© FranГ§ois Petit in 1966. Fernandez’s surreal, elliptical, and erotic bent is maybe many obviously illustrated in today’s show by his coolly sadistic painting “Untitled” (1998), which illustrates a severed, splayed, and distorted purplish bird headed human anatomy lacking volitional control while undergoing coitus. Beyond constrained, psychosomatic, surreal fantasy imagery and an over-all slippery device ambiance, it implies in my experience a particular exaggerated erotic desire that values the vulnerability of abused individual flesh held in bondage for some imagined non intimate post biological truth. A piquant wind blows you ponder the poking device directly linking the humanoid sexual system’s electronic signals to some pitiless bio controller probe, foregrounding the frailty of human flesh when pierced by the somber impregnability of technology through you as. right right Here, and regularly somewhere else through the diagrammatic, fetishized stage covered into the event, Fernandez disregards the beatific (if banal) blooming mood typically related to intimate imagery by painting in a gritty, dark, and oily metallic palette that distances his work through the tropical chromaticism usually related to his indigenous Cuba.
Agustin Fernandez, “Taboo” (2004), oil on canvas, 180 x 180 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; photo by Daniel Pype) Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (circa 2003), oil on canvas, 152 x 228 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Daniel Pype)
Other more minimal paintings showcased right right here have constrained, quasi ritualistic rigor about them that recommends separated, zoomed in glimpses of intimate bondage and humiliation, such as the exquisitely medieval“ that is looking (2004). Bound and cyborg that is freaky abound inside the work, nonetheless “Taboo” goes further into complexity since it merges intimate types of both sexes by depicting a gleaming remote black colored woman’s breast aided by the indentation inside her nipple created to resemble the opening in a penis. Once more, in other very idiosyncratic hybrid paintings, feminine parts of the body may actually have already been coerced in order to outstrip the dichotomy between technology and also the human body.
