A number of the hottest, weirdest, relentlessly provocative, and most accomplished paintings just like the vivid, shimmering, and that is seemingly gelatinous” (1997) as well as the brute “Untitled” (circa 2003), in which a farcical girl bird dominatrix is apparently as much as one thing ominous may actually allow us from the machine like repetitions noticed in the 1989 drawing “Untitled” (1989). The impression is given by these works to be impacted by the ancient, many breasted Ephesian Artemis fertility goddess.
Regardless if the kinds recommend straightforwardly constrained solitary sex types or androgynous, blended parts of the body, everything in Paradox of Pleasure talks in my experience regarding the radical human anatomy politics of cyberpunk energy, sex, and violence.
That churning anima of desire places it along with H.R. Giger’s famous 1973 painting “Penis Landscape” (aka “Work 219: Landscape XX”). But unlike Giger’s alien visual, Fernandez’s success is really a reinvention of romanticism, where in fact the performative and also the innovative seem curiously intertwined. Much more to the stage, Fernandez’s foreboding paintings share within the chopped body looks popular with Robert Gober and Paul Thek, especially Thek’s Technological Reliquaries show, including “Meat part with Warhol Brillo Box” (1965). Such as these music artists, Fernandez generally seems to take comfort in an inventiveness that may be morally negligent, gnarly, brooding, unfortunate, eccentric, and emotionally going in a manner that is maddeningly difficult to explain without mentioning brutality that is cold. It’s not for absolutely absolutely absolutely nothing this 1 of their paintings, “DГ©veloppement d’un dГ©lire” (“Development of the delusion,” 1961) which can be perhaps perhaps not in this show ended up being showcased when you look at the 1980 Brian de Palma film Dressed to destroy (a film beloved by particular performers because of its 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 together with Queen,” 1960), drawing in some recoverable format, 175 x 122 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture by Farzad Owrang)
Aesthetically, Fernandez’s paintings of armored, pansexual closeness develop a vivid psycho geography that may be a little lumbering in very similar method as Wifredo Lam’s, Roberto Matta’s, and André Masson’s mystical paintings. Nonetheless, this can be a thing that Fernandez’s drawings, like “Le Roi et la Reine” (“The King additionally 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, along with their collages (like the“Malcom that is startling X 1982), you can find complicated identifications going on that blur organic with inorganic types.
Duchamp first made mention of the device célibataire (bachelor machine) device 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, also,” 1915–23), which accentuates psychological devices that really work away from 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 straight from the source individual desire with Duchampian panache, can be an indirect outgrowth of this arrière garde, male dominant French Surrealist tastes 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 on a hyper sexed, electronic corporeality this is certainly synthetic, bionic, and prosthetic fundamentally an updated expansion for the 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 since it is to have the rhapsody of Fernandez’s loveless and lopsided sadomasochistic cybernetic pleasures playing within the male mystique, i really could perhaps not assist but additionally see the nasty permissiveness of Paradox of Pleasure in the bright light of artistic misogyny that shines from Kate Millett’s seminal 1970 study intimate Politics right through to today’s TimesUp movement. In their many alluring compositions, Fernandez imagines the effective castration associated with privileged male musician in relationship into the manipulated feminine human body. Therein lies the paradox that is pleasurable. Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (1976), drawing in writing, 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)
