The Body As Playground: The Obscene and Provocative Collage Art Of Ffo Art

Anonymity

In addition to videos of kittens, cooking, and people expressing their dissatisfaction with politics and reality, the Internet sometimes reveals some good surprises. This is the case with the images created by Ffo art ("for fans of" art), who has a channel on Instagram and a page on Tumblr. We know almost nothing about who Ffo art is, only that he/she is Russian and lives in Moscow. The artist insists on remaining anonymous, as he/she does not provide a biography or give interviews.

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Similarities With Ero Guro Nansensu

Created using Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop, his/her collages derive from anatomical illustrations, classical art, 1950’s pop culture images, and Art Nouveau prints. In his/her images, it is possible to perceive the works of artists such as Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren, Wilhelm Gallhof, and N. H. Jacob, among many others. From this fusion of references, the artist creates images in which eroticism, the grotesque, and the absurd emerge from mutilated, eviscerated, truncated, and interchanged bodies. This evocation of ero guro nansensu is not accidental because, in a certain way, when looking at Ffo art's images, we remember this movement and artists linked to it, such as Takato Yamamoto and Shintaro Kago. FFO ART has a sense of humor, in this case, dark humor, very similar to that of Shintaro Kago, as well as making use of fragmentation and permutation similarly to this Japanese artist. Regarding Takato Yamamoto, there is the same predilection for mirroring and eviscerating bodies.

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The Grotesque

These similarities between Ffo art's work and that of Japanese artists may occur due to the presence of the grotesque in their works. The grotesque, as an anarchic expression that defies the rules of order, proportion, and balance, in antiquity was seen as "an excessively ornamental style, described as 'Asian', the most threatening 'other' of the attic world, and punished as mocking, characterized as effeminate or promiscuous" (CONNELLY, Frances S. The grotesque in western art and cultures: the image at play. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p.30). The grotesque reveals itself, thus, as, according to Wolfgang Kayser, "the expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe" (KAYSER, Wolfgang. Grotesque in art and literature. Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1957, p. 185). This disorientation is based on dissolutions that question the categories of things, the concept of subject, and temporal linearity.

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Eroticism Turned Obscene

The series of dissections that Ffo art provokes in the human figure destabilizes anatomical order by exposing the interiority of bodies and mixing it with elements external to them. As they are almost always representations of nudes that the artist manipulates, the erotic emerges perverted into the obscene, since the possibility of attracting the viewer through arousal is frustrated in favor of what connects, according to Anthony Burgess, "with a particular mode of disgust - a disgust which derives from a particular zone of the human body or particular activities of the human body. In other words, we regard the lowlier, the purgative functions of the human body as necessary evils, things we must not talk about much" (BURGESS, Anthony. Obscenity and arts. London: Pariah Press, 2018., p. 59-60).

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In the extended Premium edition, among other things, more on the aesthetics and contradiction of the represented nonsense in Ffo Art's work, similarities to the famous British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus, and no less than 90 additional visual examples of his/her extraordinary collages.

Click HERE for subconscious sensuality in the collages of Karel Teige