• Being repulsed, frustrated or deeply confused by certain dynamics of heterosexuality that are considered to be the norm or standard behaviours, often regarded as universal and inevitable
• Being able to identify things that are merely tolerable about performing heterosexuality, but not necessarily things that are enjoyable or actively desired
• Reading nervousness, being flustered, or having ‘butterflies’ as attraction, but later coming to understand these things as manifestations of anxiety desired
• Choosing “crushes” rather than genuinely developing them
• Mistaking a desire a for male validation for heterosexual attraction to men

In a note describing the work, Dalí mused that the double helix is "the only structure linking man to God." This is one of 13 large paintings Dali produced. 

On the right hand side there are riflemen arranged to form "cubes of death". Within each "cube of death" their rifles aim at each other's head, thus if one of them shoots it will trigger the reaction of the other three, and they will all shoot killing each other. 

"The prophet Isaiah appears at the top left holding a scroll inscribed with the title of the painting—Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid. It combines a string of words that decodes the meaning of the work. The first word in the string is Gala, Dalí‘s wife and muse. The word ―"cid" refers to a Spanish folklore hero, and Allah is the Arabic word for God. The last word in the string is Dalí‘s spelling of the full scientific name for DNA—desoxiribunucleicacid."

It is a molecule of self-annihilation

While on a fellowship in Connecticut in 1994, Saville was able to observe a New York City plastic surgeon at work. Studying the reconstruction of human flesh was formative in her perception of the body—its resilience, as well as its fragility.

Though forward-looking, her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures—from antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso. In the striking faces, jumbled limbs, and tumbling folds of her paintings, one may perceive echoes of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (c. 1532), Rubens’s Christ in the Descent from the Cross (1612–14), Manet’s Olympia (1863), and faces and bodies culled from magazines and tabloid newspapers. Saville’s paintings refuse to fit smoothly into an historical arc; instead, each body comes forward, autonomous, voluminous, and always refusing to hide.

Likening the physicality of paint to the feeling and appearance of skin, Saville constructs sometimes horrifying images of contemporary identity.

sex becomes analogous to the visual language of decomposition

Following roots and recollecting

Kara’s new series visualizes firm bonds between otherwise fading roots, as well as the dissolution and recovery of memory.

Process of reification / cementing

Encoded with the energetic sonorities of the etheric body

creates images on photoshop before painting them.

How they obscure gender by making it more tangible

figures seem viscerally naked

He draws from Surrealism the irrationality and the exploration of the human psyche, while he takes the dreamlike dimension from Symbolism. For what concerns the use of colours, light and minute details, he is clearly inspired by Mannerism and Flemish painters. Sicioldr’s works represent his own interiority and subconscious. His paintings are immersed in an either contemplative or chaotic atmosphere, where out of time mysterious figures solemnly fill in the space, which is an undefined “somewhere else”, full of enigmas. 

Rules and boundaries are useless when dealing with metaphysics, so I just let my inner world speak without asking questions. These images are important for me and when I think about them I get a particular feeling. They need to be represented and they follow their strange irrational rules. Why do I put an element there, or use that particular color? It is because it should go there, these are the rules of the painting. I don’t think about symbolism because deliberate and intellectual reasoning can spoil the purity of a composition and the result can easily be fake. I recently discovered that a lot, maybe all of my paintings are composed within the rules of the golden section without knowing, I find this incredible but this is how human minds work.

Anna Park (b. 1996, Daegu, South Korea) makes charcoal drawings that teeter between abstraction and figuration, with imagery that hones in on the turbulent and frenzied contemporary experience. Beginning each canvas as an improvisational mark-making dance, Park composes scenes that are gestural snapshots of an over-exposed and self-aware human condition—universal moments and interpersonal exchanges she often laces with signifiers of today’s zeitgeist. In black and white works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism, moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge.

as light gets farther from the source it scales through the spectrum from yellow, closest to the light source, to orange, red, violet, and all the way to blue or sometimes green

Kitsch

Kitsch is deep in its superficiality, art is superficially deep.
– Odd Nerdrum

In Nerdrum's vision, the coprophiliac, the necrophiliac, the scatological and the phallic are all disclosed in public. Nerdrum creates a heterosexual world where civilization and technology have wilted as a natural result of their evils against nature, and the tribal society of Nordic peoples that remains, many of them twins or clones, no longer need to keep their bodies, their desires, or their biological predispositions hidden.

Fetishism no longer exists, and has been replaced by Post-Pagan rituals which retain traces of Christianity. Civilization, Nerdrum seems to say, is a set of taboos which can fall away and reveal our authentic passions and spirituality. In the setting of a gallery, a group of Nerdrum paintings also seems to serve as a litmus test which can determine who does or does not belong in the world of the cultural elite. If you like the work, you must belong.

Eugene Carriere and Joseph Beuys (he studied with Beuys in his youth). And what do these artists have in common? An interest in symbolism, spirituality, and an even hermetic interest in the artist as alchemist.

In Sleeping Prophet, he positioned himself as the object of curiosity – not as an enticing and erotic lure, for although the morphology of the painting is similar to the Borghese Hermaphroditus, his image is a bald statement of ambiguity, not sexuality.

These profane and profound paintings reveal a perennial truth. Like our ancient ancestors, like the anxious archetypal figure peering from behind the mound, we are fascinated and frightened by the ambiguity of balanced bisexuality, and ashamed of our fascination and fear. The theater of Nerdrum’s costumed hermaphrodites reveals ordinary hypocrisy, but he is not judgmental. He bears witness to honest humanity.

This painting by Nerdrum is called ‘The Dustlickers.’ It refers to how many people today consume television, social media, celebrity gossip, etc and expect these things to fulfill their desires, but it is as if they are eating dust and expecting to feel full.