Abstraktes Futa is a series of works that operate as nets of the spirit of Desire. On view here is a selection from the 18 works that comprise the series. They are a study of the post biological, abstract and impossible, ever-expanding and extreme, yet somehow inviting manifestations of sexual attraction in the contemporary world. The psychosexual cultural phenomenon of the Beautiful Fighting Girl, best described in the work of Saitō Tamaki, lies in the simultaneous attraction and tension produced by a figure who combines eroticized femininity with aggression, vulnerability with power, and innocence with the capacity for violence. All of which is accentuated by their sweet appearance. Saitō metaphorizes these phenomena as “phallic girls” in their fullest expression.

Futanari, meaning of two or duel nature, describes the artistic or pornographic phenomenon of youthful feminine figures with large phalluses. An interpretation (or perhaps better characterized as an emergence) of “phallic girls” in the most literal and ultimate iteration. They push the magnetic dichotomy of gender to its extreme where it  then collides in a radical and unique symbolic form. Though some find this style of art perverse, both within the native anime culture, and for outsiders, it signifies a new threshold in the ceaseless drive toward ultimate symbols of sexuality. Of course, the symbol is mirrored in the biological realm, which is already a contentious point of debate.

These works, derived from found imagery, collected in large quantities, rigorously edited, selected, and augmented into abstraction, represent this symbol of extreme psychosexual contortions. In their abstraction, they become approachable— safe even, despite their dangerous power and scale. We are invited to perceive them first from a distance, where their compositions (and at times pareidolia) are the most identifiable; then up close where we can appreciate their complete aesthetic excellence in their abstraction and smooth gradations of exquisitely chosen colors. The spirits of these works, which become sort of parapaintings themselves, become simultaneously complex and liberated sigils of the frontiers of Desire itself.

In methodological conversation with Thomas Ruff’s Nudes, These works are not simply pushed into abstraction as a unidimensional token of aesthetic lineage. Abstraktes Futa engages in the process of blurring— sheathing the figures from direct gaze, providing them with an unexpected form of agency over their own nature. Designed as defenseless against the eyes of all who desire, they here may exist in contrast to that very nature as autonomous symbols without need of the observer to affirm their existence.