Orlando
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.
Tai Shani, 2014
