I don’t trust in any desexualized thought, wrote Gombrowicz in his Diaries, an author that placed on record an interior discourse in which eroticism, pornography and obscenity are only nuances of the same brain loom.
The title of the exhibition curated by Javier Díaz Guardiola, Is just sex, reminds us the words of Polish writer because it opens to multiple philosophies of life around the erotic. With connotative emphasis seems to say: sex is just that, instinct, body mechanics .. and only demystifying it is possible an unprejudiced thinking about everything else.
Take away the false shame coat before entering the gallery Fernando Pradilla, whose exhibition includes a porn cinema, loosen the bra, and get rid of legacy mindsets that impel us to assume characters according to sexual preferences.
The essence of people is not in their genitals, suggests the love story between Vera and Victoria narrated with complicit glance and poetry by Mar Sáez as a silent photonovel, as a visual diary in black and white.
Faced with the necessity imposed by medicine and media of reassinging sex to transsexuals, Vera doesn’t need surgery to feel a woman.
On this type of needs created by the companies to promote patterns of behavior and self-affirmation reflect with caustic spirit Santi Ruiz and Federico Sposato. The former ridicule the pipe dream of virility, denoting the influence of video games in forging the winner model. Sposato himself takes heroic roles to exorcise the psychic burden of these legacies and somehow break the mold.
Dating apps lead as to objectified selfrepresentations of ourselves. We reduce our profiles to generic cartoons of the ideal that supposedly is looking for the other. Analyzing this phenomenon, Ruiz discovered that while hetero tends to show more and more his sensitive side, homosexuals appropriate from hypermasculine model, promoting themselves as stallions. He created a mobile application that includes a sampler performed by himself.
Edurne Herrán also analyzes the new ways to pull of homo sexualis tecnologicus, but focusing on writing. What evidence by shilfting the pixel to cross stitch with which embroiders messages collected from Tinder is the degree of tender vulgarity that prevail between computerized troglodytes. She use the same traditional technique to frame paraphilias accompanied by sympathetic emoticons, as a naif posters as those hanging on the doors of children’s rooms. Classic paraphilias as coprofilia and bestiality go hand in hand with hipster fashion (pogonofilia or weakness for bearded) and paranormal encounters (espectrofilias).
Talking about paraphilias, Ismael DeLarge plunges us into the underworld of those who become excited with crippled bodies, but from the perspective of the disabled. The beauty of compositions arouse in us mixed feelings, between disturbance and empathy.
All urban layouts include privileged areas for cruising. Juan Carlos Martinez herbarium is a study of plants growing in different parts of furtive dates. As an eccentric detective, observes (as with their secret photos taken with mobile phone) the fascination it has on each of us casual crossing with pedestrians or clandestine lovers who incite our imagination.
Fernando Bayona deal with the issue of double life from another perspective. No hits the streets in searching decisive moments, but builds them in the studio. The lives of others (male prostitutes, porn stars, strippers …) is staging in photographs that condense the narrative potential of a film in a single image. Visual poems of rootlessness, loneliness, desire, heartbreak …, filtered through the mystifying prism of film aesthetics that reveal psychic conflicts involved in imposture, the inability to remove entirely the mask arriving home. But the scenographies of Bayonne begin in his daily life, in chance encounters that detonate stories in which his subconscious will be imbricated.
The transfer between languages also determines the work of Alejandro Bombín, who often rescues anonymous photos of global family album. He emulates with pictorial means the processes of fragmentation of digital image to highlight losses of information that it suffers, acting as a metaphor of memory distortions.
Our memories dissolve in virtual liquidity, being increasingly mystified. Another twist occurs when the libido is involved in these perceptual distortions, resulting in attractive mannerisms as showing here: pictures of girls who expose their intimacy are transcribed into pictorial language simulating technical scanning, including errors that produce distortions.
Error is the gap where subjective space-time is introduced into digital fluid, enabling Bombín put pause to dissect these domestic simulacra of erotic provocation. The reality is a mental and computer construction …
And photographic…, paying attention to the hyper-realistic drawings of Juan Francisco Casas, who translates to bic pen what captures with his camera, photographic frames of excited and exciting females in histrionic poses. On this occasion, the party where he invites us is more than private, but for us there is always a Vip pass. By the way, is it not ours hand wrapped in latex that grips with these necks with gags?
Another one that could not miss is the satyr satirist of contemporary painting, Stark, in whose orgies we have to watch not be screwed by one these vicious of La Moncloa.
We finish the via voluptas sheltered by darkness, to assimilate what was seen and to prepare for sessions of porn (Fito Conesa pays tribute to a mythical film of the dawn of early days of gay industry with an illustrative scene of narratives clichés of 80’s), to enter into visceral liturgies (complex carnal allegories of Sergio Ojeda, subjective onslaughts to biopower) or suspense darkrooms (Carlos Aires), among others.
Not all is sex, but almost.
Anna Adell