After Sex

In her second anticipated exhibition at Agial Gallery, Rola El Hussein delivers a blow, having lured us in her first exhibition with paintings of a simple life, quotidian objects drawn and colored with pencils - the paraphernalia of a woman minding the daily business of her common days. This second exhibition repeats the same idyll with an added attention to pictorial construction, compatibility of various media and an enlarged iconography of ludic misuse of objects, of things held, limbs licked, or orifices waywardly kissed. But there is more in this second exhibition. Rola El Hussein is clearly engaged in reversing signifiers, concocting others, and staging liaisons where body fragments play, dance, fence, devour or in simpler terms, fuck.

Eroticism in painting abounds. From the athletic exploration of female anatomy in Hussein Madi to the veiled Balthusian perverseness of Mohamad El Rawass to the Mediterranean idylls of Theo Mansour there is much to look at in the works of local painters, much to desire, to contemplate, to lust over or scoff at. But in this abundance of women’s bodies there is a flagrant absence of sex, of intercourse, of fucking. There is also an absolute absence of female sexual agency, of initiative taken not to mention a total occlusion of what a vagina may do or want. This is no lacunae particular to the Lebanese local art scene. Writing about Théodore Géricault’s Study of Truncated Limbs (Fig. 2) critic Tom Lubbock observes that it is a painting that gives us a clue as to what Western painting glaringly omits. He writes: “Western painting, for all the intensity it brings to the human body, hardly ever does sex. It does rape. It does violence. It does solitary nakedness. But two people having normal, mutual sex? Art leaves that to pornography. There is no proper sex painting. It’s the most shameful omission.”¹

What Lubbock wittingly sees in Géricault’s horrific image are hints to a sex painting where limbs interlace in an intimate disorganization and where names retreat and succumb to the lethargy of abandonment, a glimpse of “post-coital bodies, lying head to foot in a flopped tangle.²

Jamie Gordon Limond finds in Lubbock’s remark an important reminder, but rewinds back from the post-coital connotations of Géricault’s image to the act of sex when bodies organize to seek and perform in well-orchestrated and well-practiced symmetries and balances. Such an organization he finds in the exceptional sex paintings of Welsh artist Merlin James.³ Limond writes:

In Merlin James’s sex paintings, it's essentially symmetry (doubling, coupling, mirroring) which becomes a new way of visually dealing with all this [...] A relatively simple pictorial proposition - why not represent sex with symmetry and order rather than imbalance and abandon - becomes the starting point for limitless formal-thematic exploration. And, concerned with perspective and positioning, rhyming and balancing, touch and reciprocity as the art form is, it's a uniquely painting-particular exploration.⁴

Merlin’s paintings bring forth the knowing game of sex, of bodies aligning orifices to the central axis of erect penises, opening and balancing limbs for the lunge of devouring mouths and probing fingers, all painted with a labored chalky paint and the dispassionate gaze of a pictorial architect. What Merlin’s paintings do not explore however, are reversals and mimicries. His paintings find in monogamy and heterosexuality the angles, curves, crosses, and couplings of a renewed and reinvigorated pictorial search for composition. Sex, in James’ paintings, finds a knowing painter who represents it as a scripted athletic performance on the solitary space of a canvas. Rola El Hussein’s work, and in particular a few of the smaller paintings and drawings exhibited at Agial Gallery, seem concerned with a similar task, that of representing what human parts do to make that athletic game feasible. But what is new and specific to her visual proposition is that the game is initiated and seen from the body of a woman, and more specifically from of its fragmented parts.

The Encounter (Fig. 4) is one such striking example. It shows the coupling of a penis descending from on top and an elongated and phallic vagina that bulges from below. The encounter is short- circuited by the absence of a passive receiving orifice. Instead, in the thicket of garden-grass blades and pubic hair, eroticism is done away with and replaced by a game of mimicry. The vagina plays the role of a seeking penis and in doing so snickers at the expectation of intercourse. In fact, the drawing is attentive to this impossibility and keeps the contours of the penis visible as it supposedly disappears in the penile vagina. It is as if in this moment of mimicry but also of reversal, sex is halted, temporarily deflated, and we are left to figure out how to resume the game with these altered signifiers. El Hussein is clearly engaged with continuing the game, with finding where sex still lies possible and where pleasure can still be gathered. Her larger canvases are playful and at times derisive. Bodies are never whole. Fragments are eroticized and let loose to seek active and willing partners, but only for a short while. For after the decentering of penile pleasure, sex becomes an endless heteronymic game wherein parts, objects and places behave in unexpected ways but always with the intent to keep the game of sex going. This, I think, is the result not simply of a reversal of signs, for in that lies a finitude as well, but of a visual sense of mimicry that leads to a disconcerting shuffling of signs and a defamiliarization of its representation. And this, among many things, is a “uniquely painting-particular exploration.”