Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Betty Tompkins at Rodolphe Janssen


(link)

For all the explicitness and its usual attendant cruelty Tompkins' candid blunt feels tinged remorseful for a subject that is denied the full blood of its humanity, a humanity replaced only with the lasciviousness of pornography - our genitals now denoting smut rather than humanity. Tompkins' Fuck paintings basically beginning alongside the advent of modern pornography's spread, a subject their painting seem to gather back from the photographic a pulse, restoring a faint heartbeat to the grid of measurement, reproduction; Tompkins' drawings are evidence of drawing's relevance in conjuring back something the photograph excises, holding its subject with the ginger hand of the pieta.