Alix Marie’s Orlando is an installation composed of large-scale photographic prints of close-up body parts. Orlando stems from Marie’s investigation of how to represent intimacy. She considers those moments of close proximity where every detail of the other’s skin and body is enlarged and unravelled. Tracing over the inches of her lover’s skin, the blown-up images expose and fragment his body into an amassed collection of abstract, fleshy details. The photographs have been covered in wax, crinkled, scanned and then reprinted, resulting in a trompe-l’oeil effect. The cracked wax over the fleshy depictions resembles the marbling in meat. In Orlando, the photographs have been individually formed into three-dimensional shapes and stacked together in a monumental heap that looks like a pile of meat. With this installation, she explores the somewhat cannibalistic nature of love, reflecting on a desire for incorporation and the idea of being utterly consumed.
Tai Shani on Orlando, 2014
In the proximity and detail of skin, it’s grain, palette and pores an intimate and privileged vision of the other, a vision of bottomless desire to know his flesh, consume its incomsumability, its excess, consume the real it promises and become real too through this ungoverned act. The artist and her lover, archetypal like a visceral, abject Eros and Psyche as imagined by the angel of history. But in the colossal boulders, both vulnerable and flesh-like and veined stone, another myth is invoked, that of Sisyphus and his infinite task, but here hero is conflated, flesh and object becoming one, but here also hero is heroine, and here her task is one of forever constructing and realising her lover. An undying monument to the transcendent toil of creating this lover, a faceless, anagrammatic mound of flesh, a surface upon which to project all dreams, trauma, feverish and inchoate desire.
