Scopophilia
2023
Curatorial text by Luis López Almarcha, Inéditad Gallery’s director.
The philias and phobias that we build up under the gaze of the naked male body. Images which we sometimes surround with an atmosphere of modesty and discomfort, and which we sometimes use as an instrument to give shape to our most lascivious desires. In both cases, it is clear that we still find it difficult to look at nudity in a natural way.
Scopophilia (or scoptophilia) is defined in psychology and psychiatry as a kind of pleasure that the viewer gets only from looking at something or someone. This is exactly what the photographer proposes to us. Alex Domenech (Santpedor, Barcelona, 1986) with Scopophilia, his first solo exhibition at the Inéditad gallery in Barcelona. In it, he wants the visitor to become a real voyeur, a spy in intimate scenes in which the male nude is deliberately the protagonist, and with which he wants to provoke a series of reactions that go beyond mere arousal: blush, attraction and, why not, rejection and indifference.
The psychoanalysts who coined the term, such as Freud, Fenichel or Lacan, agreed that the innate instinct that lies behind the pleasure of looking is part of the foundations that build the identity of the person who looks; in parallel, they developed the imaginary that represents the discovery of genitality. An aspect, that of genitality, that Alex Domènech addresses in a totally spontaneous way, in the purest Robert Mapplethorpe style, reminding us, as the famous American photographer already did, that «beauty and the devil are the same thing» and that the dirt, if there is any, does not have to be on the person looking at it, nor on what is being looked at. If Alex Domènech achieves anything, it is to deconstruct the pornographic gaze, to strip it of any halo of dirtiness. To do this, he re-educates the viewer’s vision of it through photographic work that transforms the sexual into true visual poetry.
This process, inspired by aesthetic pleasure, is perfectly in line with the message of this exhibition, which is, above all, to free the male nude from censorship, taboos and complexes, and to encourage the visitor to be receptive to all kinds of stimuli.
Tobías G. Natter was the curator of the «Naked Men» exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2012. His poster featured a photograph by Pierre & Gilles of three frontal male nudes. The museum received so many complaints that it was forced to cover up the genitals in the reproductions of the poster that were subsequently distributed. Natter himself admitted that if the nudes had been female, the controversy would have been almost non-existent.
With precedents like this, an exhibition like Scopophilia It is absolutely necessary to open the debate on whether there is the same permissiveness between the male nude and the female nude, not only in the world of art, but in the different spheres of our society.
In this exhibition, Alex Domènech presents for the first time the works that make up his latest photographic oeuvre. We will see how he decontextualises moments of intimacy by transferring them to outdoor spaces. Self-portraits from his ABISMO series will also be on show. Self-portraits that he masterfully intersperses with landscape photography to generate metaphorical discourses on the insecurities and complexes surrounding our own naked body. A body that the photographic lens has the ability to reify, to turn into an object, to materialise and eliminate any trace of affectivity. The works «Resistencia» and «Self-portrait and encounter» will also be shown together for the first time, two impressive large-format photographic works that represent a declaration of intent: to escape the canons established by a heteronormative society. Two snapshots of two couples of naked gay boys enjoying their sexuality, relegated to a private level. By normalising the scene with the complicity of the viewer, the author manages, thanks to this «voyeuristic» gaze, to give freedom to those who are unjustly condemned to interact in secret.
Scopophilia is presented to us as an opportunity to measure the censorship with which we judge the male nude and, in parallel, to surprise (or disappoint) ourselves at our possible lack of tolerance. We invite you to check it out.
Image from the exhibition of Scopophilia by Inéditad Gallery in Barcelona, November 2023.
