“Where is the eroticism in the art of my generation?
My generation cherishes loneliness
prizing it even above sex.
They are so sensitive,
they are allergic to each other.”
(Marlene Dumas, A-sexual)
Marlene Dumas (born in 1953 in Cape Town) is one of the most unsettling and philosophically charged voices in the contemporary figurative painting and nowhere is her radical intelligence more evident than in the way she redefines the erotic. In Dumas’s artworks, eroticism is neither celebratory nor pornographic; it is not decorative nor even conventionally sensual. Her erotic mode is existential, post-religious yet spiritually raw. It is disarming precisely because it strips desire of theatrics and exposes its moral instability. If classical erotic painting idealised the body and modern pornography commodified it, Dumas does something far more dangerous: she neither beautifies nor condemns, but forces us to stand before the human body as a psychologically unstable fact. The body as event. The body as ethical crisis.
Fig.1 Marlene Dumas, Silk Stockings, 2000
Fig.2
Fig.3
Dissolving Flesh
Her medium, the thinned, bleeding oil and ink on unprimed canvas or paper, is essential to this philosophical position. She does not sculpt form; she lets bodies emerge like stains, like afterimages, like memories or dreams or evidence. In her erotic works, such as in the woman putting on her black stocking in Fig.1. or the woman leaning down to the viewer in Fig.6., the boundaries of the figure are never secure. Flesh dissolves. Faces bloom or collapse. The erotic is not posed, not performed; it leaks like watercolour, it haunts, it unmoors. Desire is treated not as beauty but as power and vulnerability merged into a single state of exposure.
Fig.4 Marlene Dumas, Fingers, 1999
Fig.5 Marlene Dumas, Handy, 1992
Fig.6 Marlene Dumas, Morning Dew, 1997
Colours of the Nipple
This flowing watercolour elements is found in quite a few of her artworks, a beautiful example is seen also in Fig.8. where the couple is seen about to make love, and in Fig.9. which shows a close up view of a woman’s face and her naked bosom, the colours of the nipple, lips and armpit hair are all distinctly darker than the rest and the colour seems as if it has a life of its own, not as if it’s strictly controlled by the artist. Also, the way the painting is framed is interesting as well, it is that sort of Japonism inspired way of cropping an artwork which European art started experimenting with in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Fig.7
Fig.8
Fig.9
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