Naked or knickers? A man’s view of a (not quite) nude woman.
Sometimes you go to the opening of a show and you’re the first person there. You get to see the work without the throng. It gives you a chance to really look, and look again. Even the chance to gaze. But maybe then it’s all too easy to see what’s not there too. “ABISMATISMOS”, a new show by Alejandro Casanova is a case in point. It’s at Artevistas Gallery just off Calle Ferran, which is just off The Ramblas. That’s not to say that what the gallery offers is especially touristy, but I can imagine an art savvy visitor buying a piece or two as a souvenir.
It’s an odd sensation, walking past hundreds of art pieces covering the walls, and stacked up ready to flick through, just to get to the works I’m going to look at today. What if you miss something really special here, something that’s better than the actual show? Eyes are shifting from here to there, peripheral vision catching a glimpse of something that might turn out to be…
…when you get to the space at the rear of the gallery you’re already slightly confused, maybe a little dazed. But it’s ok. There’s no one else here, I can relax and enjoy taking my time looking. And what I can see are some rather nice nudes, female nudes. Sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes lonely, sometimes very lonely. That terrific distance you get when you are with your lover but you are beyond communication. These are poignant scenes which draw you in to feel the pain, to question the morality.
But let’s start with the floors. Those delicious hexagonal tiles. The ones you find in many of the older apartments here in Spain. They are called “hydraulic” tiles, because the process of making them involves a hydraulic press which creates so much heat that the concrete powder fuses into a solid block. I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, because it was about this time that I looked at the titles of the works. “Baño y estancia con suelo hidráulico hexagonal”, “Bañera y suelo hidráulico hexagonal”. OK, so the works are titled by the places the scenes are situated, and the objects in them. Not by the names of the people in them. Interesting. But how about “Cama, braga y almohada a rayas”? Bed, knickers and striped pillowcase. And the person on the bed? The person in the knickers? Why is the person so unimportant here that they don’t get a mention in the title? Why are the women ignored?
The second reason for mentioning the hydraulic tiles is metaphorical. For when you look at those knickers, really look at them, you realise there is nothing inside. There is no skin, no muscle, no bone. Casanova has not started from the inside and worked out, with a deep and confident understanding of human anatomy. Rather it seems he has tried to resolve the bottocks and failed, and, in order to save the painting, has popped a pair of panties on. The paintings are not fused into solid, resolved scene. This revelation makes me run round the now filling gallery to have a look at the other interstices. And there they are, between the head and the pillow, between the arm and the chair. Yes, these are beautiful compositions. Yes, the colours bring pathos. Yes, I would hang one on my bedroom wall. But no. Nothing is actually resolved here. The sense of people being melded in the space is missing. It is disconcerting. Maybe that’s why they are not mentioned in the titles?
The blurb for this show gives you all the usual nonsense that could be understood anyway, just by spending a little more time looking, a little less time catching up with your mates over a free beer. But then the writer, the critic if you will, goes a step too far. Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud. I understand the need to invoke the names of artists we might have heard of. It gives the viewer a mental crutch to add this new work to the pantheon. In fact, I’m not a fan of Hopper. But I get what he was doing and I get that he was working stuff out. And Casanova’s scenes have some of that haunting, uneasy quality. That story-telling without telling a story. So I’ll let it go. But Freud was not frightened of a cunt. A pussy, a beaver, a box. A muff, a twat, a snatch, a gash. There is no pudendum in Freud’s work. There is no shame.
Casanova wouldn’t know where to look if he saw a naked woman. You can get your titties out, but please, keep your panties on. And by ignoring the person in the title of each work, he’s just making things worse.
In an interview he says that he paints bare women without artifice or pose. The female form is not there to show sensuality, in order to delight the viewer, but rather naturalness. The viewer feels like a voyeur of the scene, without crossing over to the obscene. There are times when we bend to ourselves, face our fears, anxieties and loneliness, where we enjoy almost absolute freedom and shed our clothes.
Almost absolute freedom? Why not run about with gay abandon? Shed all of your clothes. That’s what I do when I feel natural. Being naked is not about facing fears, it’s about being fearless. Wearing panties, or just a shirt, or even being starkers in a hat is more sexual, more alluring than being naked. There’s nothing sexy, nothing obscene about a Freud nude. There’s openness, and honesty, and irrepression.
Casanova’s argument holds no water with me. I wish I could let it wash over me, and just enjoy the paintings. But anytime a man presents a show comprised solely of women, he is making a political statement. A gender statement. And however unwittingly, Casanova’s got it wrong. He needs to open up. To open his mind, open his attitude, and most of all, open those legs.
