FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
SLEAZY hotel rooms belong to the “lay now, pay later” way of life. A conflation of private and public domains, with their starched sheets and lumpy mattresses, they are imbued with an air of erotic anonymity. And to the artists of Visible Traces (at the Market’s Rembrant van Rijn Gallery) — Robert Vermeulen, Charl and Belinda Blignaut and Phillip Hunt — they signify sites for exploring sexual desire, pleasure and pain.
A collaborative multi-media exhibition, Visible Traces is an honest, even courageous show, given the explicitness of the imagery and the inherent problems of its articulation. After all, how does one describe sex without lapsing into in-your-face literalness? Comprehension lies in deed, not description. And this is partly where the artists (except Hunt, for his images are more layered) get themselves into a bind.
Androgyny, fetishism, rituals of domination and subjugation, not to mention the smashing of sexual thresholds, are the subject matter of their photographs. Although they aim less to shock than to explore sexual consciousness, the images tap into the psychology of arousal, placing the viewer/voyeur in the precarious roles of onlooker, perpetrator and accomplice.
Strangely, not a single image expresses the sexual act itself, or for that matter suggests any real relationship of intimacy or pleasure between the participants. Instead the photographs have a cold artiness about them, and, rather than engaging the viewer, offer a visual overload of strangely alienating banality.
Something similar can be said of Belinda Blignaut’s stitched leather and metal works. Seductive in texture and appearance, they speak of corsetry, surgery, skin and sex. But although the bondage associations are unmistakable, the works seem too uniform, controlled and tied to surface design to transcend the level of designer art. Ironically, given Blignaut’s exploration of sexual frontiers, the risk and undercurrent of violence integral to this lifestyle are almost entirely absent from her work.
Yet Hunt’s canvases seem almost to sweat with erotic resonances. Ignore the obtuse titles and focus instead on the gritty textures and subtle tones of his imagery — photographs of strange headboards, and female limbs protruding from rumpled, shroud-like sheets. Red paint splotches — symbolising violence and passion — can be read alternatively as the mark of the abstract expressionist, suggesting the artifice of the imagery, or as a curtain — half revealing yet concealing the scene behind.
Here, the viewer feels the twin tastes of desire and repulsion, as well as a sense of complicity in an act which binds pleasure and pain in an obsessive embrace.
Visible Traces is on view until May 4
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