Mans devient view

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on February 22, 2014 at 2:23pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

Your expert skill in Classical Renaissance rendering and oil painting seems to come full circle into contemporary gender issues and ideas in Man’s Deviant View.  The languid pose of this Adam becomes a coyly stylized counterpoint to Eve as vapid seductress.  Presented as costumed fetish underneath sparse fruit rather than the archetype of the Biblical narrative, this Eve is oddly self aware and sexualized, and yet captures a coquettish reticence. For me the black and white achromatic palette also intones a dark feminine quality against the “light” of Adam’s natural skin pigmentation.  However, it could also be argued that the male figure is overly feminine, as his smooth and hairless thin body exhibits an extremely pale complexion. The cool blackish backgrounds of the two halves of the diptych unify their figure-ground relationships, but I find it a bit curious the female figure is larger in her occupied frame.  Perhaps this image is cropped slightly?  I notice their elbows are chopped off as well as the female’s feet.  Ultimately I’m not sure how to reconcile this smart and provocative narrative piece with the Leonardo drawings and architectural depictions.  The various castle structures appear to have been manipulated digitally, but I’m not sure to what end.  They present as intense or more Romanticized versions of themselves, as in the case of Durham City and Cathedral, and Bamburgh.  But I continue to be pulled back into the figurative relationships presented in the first two works.   The concealment of the artist’s hand and lack of overt textural distortion present the subjects as frozen in disparate times, with conflicting sentiments towards sexual identity and mythology.