Cathexus

Cathexus is a series of eighteen works that operate as nets Desire. Their point of departure is Saitō Tamaki’s “phallic girl,” a figure whose complete fictionality does not diminish desire, but becomes the condition through which desire gives the image its reality. Cathexus pushes this logic toward the post-biological, where the body exceeds anatomy and becomes an impossible symbol through which Desire takes form.

Futanari names a pornographic figure in which feminine form and exaggerated phallic anatomy occupy the same body. It pushes Saitō’s phallic girl beyond the symbolic: the phallus returns as anatomy, made literal and extreme. These figures push the magnetic dichotomy of gender toward a point at which its opposing poles collide in a radical symbolic form. Though this imagery has often been regarded as perverse, both within and beyond the subcultures from which it emerges, its persistence marks another threshold in the ceaseless production of extreme symbols of sexuality. Here, sex itself becomes increasingly mutable, and the body exceeds its biological limits in pursuit of an increasingly total symbol of desire.

Derived from found imagery collected over two years, rigorously edited, dramatically manipulated, and augmented into abstraction, these works take that extreme psychosexual symbol as their material. Through abstraction, the figures become approachable—safe, even—despite the intensity and scale of what they contain. They are first encountered from a distance, where composition and, at times, pareidolia are most immediately legible; then at close range, where their smooth gradations of color and increasingly nonfigurative surfaces begin to overtake the bodies from which they were derived. The spirits of these works, functioning as parapaintings in their own right, become simultaneously complex and liberated sigils at the frontiers of Desire itself.

Cathexus asks how little information is necessary for desire to activate, even as the works withhold the very information desire normally consumes. Their movement toward abstraction is not merely a gesture of aesthetic lineage. Blurring is a decisive operation: a sheathing of the figures from the direct gaze, withholding them from the conditions through which they were originally made visible. Images structured around erotic visibility are allowed here to resist that condition, becoming autonomous symbols whose existence no longer depends upon the observer’s desire to affirm them.