The belated Cuban musician Agustin Fernandez developed a gloomy, gritty human body of works that imagine a hyper sexed, electronic corporeality.

PARIS A visceral, hyper sensibility that is sexualized through the extravagantly trendy oeuvre of Cuban musician Agustin Fernandez, whom resided right right here from 1959 to 1968 and passed away in new york in 2006. The effectiveness of plucky erotic fantasies and sexual innuendos, Fernandez’s leitmotif, usually supersedes respectful social significance, so one part of Fernandez’s inventive art is forever likely to be libertine, even though tempered by our knowing that the dominance associated with the right western male position is not any longer unquestioned in art. Gender is socially ( maybe perhaps not naturally) constructed and, whenever thought to be a fluid concept in art, defies effortless recognition. Of course, there is nothing less specific in art than sex, and even though 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 recommend otherwise, a lot of women feel there will be something profoundly feckless, or even downright alienating, about reducing the human anatomy to its isolated intercourse components. Not too in Paradoxe de la Jouissance (“Paradox of Pleasure”), the chutzpah packed exhibition of Fernandez’s controversial late work insightfully curated by Jeanette Zwingenberger in the town hallway of Paris’s 4th arrondissement.

Agustin Fernandez, “Untitled” (1998), oil on canvas, 94 x 144 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; photo by Daniel Pype)

Art historically, Fernandez’s slightly sadomasochistic and obsessively xhamsterlive. om erotic semi abstract paintings of constrained human body 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 by the day that is latter, Fernandez revealed with Francis Picabia at Galerie Fürstenberg in 1965 along with Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, and Pierre Roy at Galerie André François Petit in 1966. Fernandez’s surreal, elliptical, and bent that is erotic maybe many plainly illustrated in the present show by his coolly sadistic painting “Untitled” (1998), which illustrates a severed, splayed, and distorted purplish bird headed human body lacking volitional control while undergoing coitus. The vulnerability of abused human flesh held in bondage to some imagined non romantic post biological reality beyond constrained, psychosomatic, surreal dream imagery and a general slippery machine ambiance, it suggests to me a certain exaggerated erotic desire that values. 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 elsewhere through the diagrammatic, fetishized stage covered within the event, Fernandez disregards the beatific (if banal) blooming mood typically related to intimate imagery by painting in a gritty, dark, and greasy metallic palette that distances his work through the tropical chromaticism usually connected with his indigenous Cuba.

Agustin Fernandez, “Taboo” (2004), oil on canvas, 180 x 180 cm (courtesy and Agustin Fernandez Foundation; picture 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 here have constrained, quasi ritualistic rigor about them that recommends separated, zoomed in glimpses of intimate bondage and humiliation, just like the exquisitely medieval“ that is looking (2004). Bound and cyborg that is freaky abound inside the work, nonetheless “Taboo” goes further into complexity because it merges intimate kinds of both sexes by depicting a gleaming remote black colored woman’s breast with all the indentation inside her nipple created to resemble the opening in a penis. Once again, in other extremely idiosyncratic hybrid paintings, female parts of the body may actually have now been coerced to be able to outstrip the dichotomy between technology additionally the human body.