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CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
G uy Aon Lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel
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ature and body. Body and nature. Two subjects of my fascination, occupying my attention ever since the beginning of my artistic path, have later expanded into exploring and studying sexuality and taboo life forms, whom I photograph over the past five years, and which have directly affected my formalistic approach towards photography - both as technique and medium. I have taken a decision to put aside the “narrative images making”, and instead relate photography as a twofold medium that is an image and an object at the same time. Accordingly, my works are photography based, yet treated and presented as sculptures, binding together photographic strategies with material sculptural manipulations. I absolutely do not consider this act as a merely formal trend, but as an actual expansion of the medium as part the evolution photography is going through, repositioning it in relation to the contemporary art field in general, and to the new developing interrelations between two dimensional and three dimensional in particular. Furthermore, this move represents a significant attempt to undermine the accepted pattern; defamiliarize the hackneyed photographic image and challenge the need to reinforce and reposition this art object. Hence, the working process comprises an intriguing research of the materialistic possibilities hidden in photography and using photographed images not as its objective or focus, but as a plastic platform which undergoes concealments and disruptions. I mount lambda prints on aluminum and cut them in CNC machine (a lathe). The result is large scale photographic cutouts which are
transformed into peculiar objects, set in the space as paper cutouts or set against colorful screens which serve as their background. Often the images themselves have sculptural qualities within them. They are created out of an installation - a choreographic gesture which exists only at the very moment of photography, and falls apart a minute later. I set up and document in my studio, unusual body positions or strange man-object combinations; bodies are wrapped around each other, sometimes covered and disguised in wigs, clothing parts and accessories or in metal objects, fur and bamboo – structuring erotic hybrids, decorative physical-mechanical stumps and sex- monsters. It is a blunt nakedness, arranged, even engineered, in a manner which takes it out of the body’s context and plants it new environments, generating an almost pure aesthetical outcome. If so, stretching the limits of photography towards a material direction shapes an elusive artwork, one that does not fully gives itself away; the objects’ built-in concealmentexposure games - flirt with the gaze and suspend it. Furthermore, by using their aesthetical measures, the sculptures I produce embody, within their very own presence, the notion that a certain object can be a popular women’s accessory in one culture, a taboo and fetish in another, or treated as a religious artifact in other social contexts. In this manner, the works demonstrate how art and the art of photography in particular, can and should engage in grand questions of gender, sexual and cultural identity, yet without necessarily be theoretical or didactic.
Guy Aon