To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude,” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. (Kenneth Clark, Naked, nude and ideal form)
From our perspective it seems that the history of representation of nude remained preferably linked to the female body, but actually the reluctance to show naked man is linked to the Victorian mentality. Before the nineteenth century, from the ancient Greeks to neoclassicism, the male nude is imposed as an ideal canon: beauty and virtue go hand in hand in the Greco-Roman heroic allegories, while Renaissance and Baroque period will be mostly biblical epic that justify eroticism of a turning David, the morbid forms of a tortured San Sebastian, a suffering Christ …
When realism prevails in painting and mythological and devotional excuses are no longer valid is when man ceases to feel comfortable showing nude and set before his surrogate, which came from his rib, which does not require (thinks the male) intellectual parapet to appear as pure object of desire.
But interestingly it will be in the photographie, the new technique had helped settle the naturalistic realism in painting, where anonymous naked bodies will move, bodies of desire distributed in clandestine circuits.
Alexis W resumed at that point the story of the male nude, collecting old photographs in flea markets worldwide, from chronophotographic studies to boxers in the ring, slim dancers, soldiers of the 1st World War in their leisure hours… Desnudos y Desenlaces, in Mad is Mad gallery, hosts a good selection of these documents of time together with a series of black and white nudes of the artist whose extemporaneous patina harmonize with his collection.
His experience as collector must have influenced his own work, in which we also see fighters, bodies in natural landscapes, domestic scenes, portraits … His work ranges from the capture of strong personalities and eagerness to dilute identities in natural or urban environments. Pinguid portraitist and street sociologist, but also a sculptor of light bodies and desire, mosaics of sensations.
One more year, coinciding with the celebration of gay pride in the neighborhood of Chueca, Alexis W has extended his rear window (fourteenth edition) in Pelayo Street, subverting the boundaries between public and private, showing intimate aspects but giving priority to fragment, the veil, filters, hiding games that spur the imagination.
We see the world through indiscreet screens twenty-four hours a day, so why not get them out to the street and integrate this new form of vision with the neighborhood life, without hiding or leaving the community.
Ongoing projects managed by Alexis W on the occasion of LGTB week in Madrid:
