It takes a few moments to figure out that what you are looking at is indeed a naked body. Whether a nipple or a navel, each image keeps you guessing as to what part of the form you are looking at.
Using the most successful photographs of a group of naked bodies, Fleshlight will run from Dec. 4-30 at La Petite Mort Gallery.
Found in a neighbourhood of better-known galleries exhibiting conventional oil-on-canvas technique, La Petite Mort is a truly unique fixture. Both male and female bodies are represented in these striking photographs, but will demure Ottawans shy away from this exhibit or will they buy?
The exhibit is the product of an evening that took place a year ago at the same La Petite Mort Gallery. Forty naked bodies – a mélange (ménage à) 40 if you will – were selected to be photographed for an exhibit at the gallery. Using low-key lighting and lens filters, participants were cast in shadow and illuminated with the most brilliant colours. Even though each body was photographed individually, the arrangement resembles a colourful orgy rather than solitary figures.
According to photographer Ludwig Ciupka’s formal exhibit statement, the Montreal-based multimedia artist strives to find, “a synergetic point between the two popular media . . . emerging from an urgent and fundamental need to be in contact with ‘raw matter.’” These “pigments of flesh” accomplish just that. Ciupka has merged photography and painting techniques by hand-mounting his photographs and coating each with epoxy to give them an impressively high sheen. Imperfections in the way the epoxy has dried show the handcraft. But is this enough?
These mostly life-size images are tantalizing, touchable, beautiful bodies. The eroticism arises, but remains impersonal. No faces appear. These are more than nude portraits and faces would make them too personal. Epoxy covered unedited photographs stretched over hand-built frames give a three-dimensional look as the image bends on the frame. Though it looks like something easily created on Photoshop using the gradient technique, there has been no airbrushing and no computer editing of any kind. All the effects are accomplished with different lens filters, lights and shadow. Black negative space dominates the image.
The bodies are perfect, but are flawless skin and toned muscles indicative of the most interesting art? There is no shock value in the naked palette, even those adorned with tattoos. This is a modern continuation of homage to the body, a tasteful tradition. Think Richard Avedon’s Beatles psychedelic images and you are halfway there. Ciupka is technically a fine artist. He aims for and achieves delicacy as his work establishes a new language for the debate of human form and intimacy. He is just beginning to speak to us with this exhibit. But with a subject so simple and elegant as the human body, it is a wonder that more art has not been created like it. Predictions are that these works will some day be priceless.
It is high time for an exhibit like Fleshlight to shake up this artistically sleepy town and pave the way for a new wave of art that is erotically shocking, yet stunning at the same time.