30 July 2025
Prism: somewhere between Suck (2004) by Merlin James and Hand above Torso (2007) by Co Westerik. Erotic paintings have appealed to me recently as exercises in detaching an image/subject of a painting from the painting's content, which is something I'm broadly quite interested in right now. The friction that comes from resisting deliberate image-making in favor of murkier waters around formal exploration is creatively fertile, especially when that image is sexually explicit in nature—how impassive or subdued can a painting remain when its content predisposes it to attention?