you are what you art

Friday, January 14, 2022

Talking about Art is like dancing about food. I don’t remember the exact quote but it was expressing the futility of translating one medium into another.
Of course one can talk about Art, give technical information about its execution, point out the iconography and iconology, to alert your attention to elements you might miss during your brief encounter with that work.

I like an art critic or anyone that tells me a story about a work of art, only if they tell me what that work does/did to them. This way, a new “work” emerges.

I am not going to translate my figurines/small statues for you. Look if you like, feel and think what you like. However, I have noticed that a great number of people who looked at them and wrote me their thoughts or asked questions, missed to see what really drives me to do what I do. So here’s what’s behind my fingers, when I sculpt a figurine.

My encounter with the human naked body took place at a very early age (months old) because I was brought to a naturist beach during summer. My sex instinct was not awaken before the age of 6 -7 so all the nude men and women I saw on the beach were just that: humans as they came into the world, naked, like myself.
Of course the beach was not a gym or erotic movie set, everyone was freely exposing their body to the Sun, not to a jury.
For whichever reasons, society diverged from that position and the exposed naked human is expected to be an Olympian citizen.

The curves and volumes I model in my statues, to me, are only lines and volumes that feel under my fingers like music feels to my ear drums.
For this reason I sometimes exaggerate proportions because a statue is an object that can be hold in your hand and turned around. Each angle gives me another “visual song”.

Regarding the size of the penis, which often is exaggerated.
Oscar Wilde said, and I fully agree, everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is about Power.
Being a male, I grew up observing the world through this perspective and I was influenced by it, to a certain degree.
The original Olympic Games took place in the buff and wrestlers competed naked. As one can see in photos of modern wrestlers during competition, some get erections under their suits. It’s a normal physical reaction, in body combat men get the adrenaline running which rise their mast. The same reason is behind the cheerleaders before an American football game, they’re there to titillate the sportsmen, to charge them with the energy they need for the game.
So when I sculpt men in wrestling positions, with unusual penis sizes, I visualize the Power rapport going on there. Have you ever seen a man with a penis half his body size?…
The Japanese Shunga paintings depict the Japanese men with enormous penises. It’s their way of visualizing the male power in that sex encounter.

One last thing about men sexually interacting with another man, as seen in some my works.
A man is an active sex partner. His penis can penetrate another human body. It is also naturally possible that the same man can be penetrated by another man’s penis. There’s that equal potential in there that I illustrate. A man being penetrated is named by uneducated culture as “passive”. More recently the gay culture started to understand the limitations of that notion and invented the term “aggressive bottom”.
Penetrating or being penetrated has little to do with the character and “power drive” of that man.
The Japanese traditional culture, before being flooded by Western morals and religions, observed as normal the male/male body relationship. All cultures did that, from The Greeks and Spartans, to the Romans and Arabs. Plenty of accounts there.
In Japan the Samurai is portrayed as the one penetrating his male personal assistant (shudo), to illustrate that rapport of Power. They often wear their swords during “sex”. But there are stories of skilled Samurais being “passive” in their love making.
Alexander the Great was known to swing both ways, Tiberius the Emperor was “a man with women and a woman with his men”.

Like everything else, history comes back in new forms, someday the people will not find unusual the statue of 2 men body wrestling and sexually charged, carved in marble, at the Louvre. It happened before and this is how we got where we are, nobody died. Morals also change and are not universal. A huge woman in one culture is venerated, in other is shamed. A man with a very small penis is regular in some parts of the world while in others only a horse sizes gets attention.

As I am not making pornographic statues (feel free to see just that in my works), what is sculpt is an energy present when two men interact, the way I see it. Turning that energy into matter is what drives me to spend many hours sculpting. The Material Echo of two men confronting each other in society is what I see in my head and flows through my senses, when my fingers touch the clay or carve the stone.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Is Art about You?

OK, let’s start with a simple supposition. Throughout history humans demonstrated that they somehow care how future generations will remember them. They build triumphal arches to celebrate victories, re-written history to their advantage, etc.
We know of men having relationships (sexual and/or emotional) with other men through the art(ifacts) we discovered, texts that were preserved.
Some fish practice shoaling and schooling because power is in numbers (as the men gathering on stadiums). When gays were schooling to have their presence recognized by law, their Art was in the struggle and victory. Stonewall is such a work of art, if you like.
When most people feel safe, the shoaling breaks off and the members start to care less or not at all about the others like them. The fight for a personal Triumphal Arch starts at the Apple store.

I attach here 3 drawings.
One is a portrait of a man drawn by a queer man.
The second is a homoerotic scene, safe for work, that was drawn by a queer man but could have been drawn by a straight woman (so many women write tons of m/m literature where the sexual act between the men is described as if the writer knew the feeling from her own experience. And people buy that).
The third is a drawing of a homo-sexual act (probably still safe for work, no genitals exposed, everything is suggested). It could have been drawn by anyone with some skill. It was drawn by a queer man. All 3 drawings are made by me, by it’s not about me, if you get the drift ;-)

My question is: which one is Gay Art? Well, Art cannot be gay but you know what I mean, don’t you?). Which one you think would speak about you or the life and existence of gays in this particular day and age? When one sees a straight actor interpreting a gay character on screen, several voices rise up in anger.
Since this group is about visual art, let’s start here, if you like. In 500 years someone digs up an artifact that speaks about your life and times. Reminder, before mid 1800s the word homosexual did not exist. Gays before that, in various cultures, were seen in different ways. Homophobes always existed, we’re …humans:-(