Erotic Surrealism

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Surrealism and eroticism  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

In the mid 20th century, surrealism offered new modes of representation of the nude. For surrealist artists, the erotic became a way of exploring ideas of fantasy, the unconscious and the dream state. Artists such as Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst are well known surrealist artists that dealt with the erotic directly.

Contents 1 Desire Unbound 2 Sade’s influence on Surrealism 3 Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928-1932 4 L’Érotique du surréalisme 5 Surréalisme et sexualité

“Eroticism was the theme of a major surrealist exhibition held in 1959. Designed by Breton and Marcel Duchamp, it was arranged as a journey through a series of feminine spaces. Visitors entered the gallery through a ‘love grotto’, a dark cavernous tunnel that led to a rose-coloured chamber where the ceiling seemed to breathe in and out. The recording of women’s orgasmic sighs, made specially for that exhibition and not heard publicly since, is played in this space.” [1]

See also

• Man Ray‘s erotic photography, most famously Printemps, Eté, Automne, Hiver
• Marcel Duchamp‘s Please Touch
• Surrealism
• Eroticism
• Desire Unbound
• Sade’s influence on Surrealism
• L’Érotique du surréalisme
• Surréalisme et sexualité
• 20th century erotica

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Surrealist Erotica: In Memory of Nusch Eluard

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Mme. Ionesco: the lady of eroticism

By Priscilla Santos

The corresponding world is not really this one. In fact, reality is nothing more than a whim of abstraction in a universe where, in black and white and low light, we see the transfiguration, the unfathomable, unattainable, fantastic and dark eroticism of the women of Irina Ionesco.

Baudelaire inevitably comes to the fore: the Symbolist writer who dedicated himself so much to fatal women, vampire women, certain figures of the night, is a key feature in Ionesco’s works, even if the artist conceals or dissembles: I know that critics make references to Baudelaire, to the Belgian Symbolists, to Tânatos, to Eros… It doesn’t change the disc. Born in France in 1935, the daughter of Romanians, Mme’s fate could not be the most picturesque: fleeing home as a young girl, she found shelter in a circus where she was a snake tamer, a dancer and the target of a knife thrower. In the mid-1960s, an accident changed its course and Irina approached the fine arts through painting. It is precisely from this moment that her first works, armed with a Nikon manual, set out to seek her own spirit in the forms of other bodies.

It is essential that we talk about spirit because the author’s set of images is in fact a mystical set. The women portrayed are, above all, totem entities that seem to have burst into the life of Ionesco who was readily there to capture the moment of apparition in a frenzy of improvisation. No models chosen by the agency, their standards are different. Her eyes seek out what seems to be around her, and it is not even necessary to read her critics and commentators to form an opinion at the sight of each piece. Ionesco exposes his own nude in outer bodies in a striking way.

They are super powerful women, self-supporting, unfathomable, always very adorned with their objects, feathers, veils, mirrors. Mainly from your jewelry, which are symbols; enactments, translations of life, death, birth, love, dream and madness, as the author herself lists. Overly made up or deliciously masked, they are fantastically made fetish pieces: fetishists flirting with the wicked, with submission, with the goth. Naked in any way.

Ionesco elevates eroticism to the most cutting of intimacy, to a terrifying secret from which one cannot escape: female seduction, lethargic seduction. A seduction that no longer concerns the shape or age of those photographed. Her sensuality also comes from dreamlike journeys, sweetness, enchanted forests and softness, naive games in a web of provocations. Adjectives are inexhaustible, reflection is a delusion.

Irina Ionesco had her first exhibition in 1974 at the Nikon Gallery in Paris, then in London, Holland, New York, and then the world in traveling exhibitions that are still held today. She works today with fashion editorials but doesn’t hide that it’s not one of her favorite tasks. Living in Paris, Mme. Ionesco still produces and, far from digital photography, seeks new encounters.

In July, when she was in Brazil exhibiting at the SESC Copacabana gallery, she gave an interview to Época magazine where she revealed her plans for a new project; “a work inspired by Alice in Wonderland, with an eight-year-old girl”. For her it’s not a shocking statement, for those who know her work, it’s a new dive into the controversial. A dive that goes by the name of Eva…

Her trajectory impairments are reflected in a refined look at what is unfathomable in the female soul through a tangent of sensuality. Even before her first exhibition, in 1975, French photographer Irinia Ionesco had already aroused the interest of a particular group of artists; but its success – paradoxical – and acclaim would come from its greatest scandal; the exhibition Eloge by Ma Fille would enter the Nikon gallery in Paris and it was that same fetishistic gaze now turned to her, Eva Ionesco… from 5 to 10 years old, in erotic essays.

According to Irina, the proposal that originated the series of photographs came from Eva herself; they were undoubtedly years very different from ours, of a search for and acceptance of sexual freedom, or even the freedom of bodies. As a woman and artist, born of her time, it didn’t seem strange to the Frenchwoman that Eva could also be the target of symbolist photographs and that she was focused exactly like the other women, adults, targets of Irina’s lenses.

The dates diverge – some say 4 to 11 years old, others 5 to 10 years old; we are left here with the second possibility because it is the most found in the sources – but, systematically, year after year, the photographer used her daughter as a model in black & white photographs of extreme precision and daring. Even bolder than that found in the other obsessive images produced by Ionesco, much greater. Eva appears in nude, but the terrifying effect is the same if she is captured dressed, like this? It’s intriguing.

Thus, the girl Eva appears as a child-woman in the same dark air, adorned with dozens of jewels or ordinary costume jewelry, artifacts that speak of this particular world where delirium, death, sensuality and passion coexist. She would almost be an entity, a totem, a myth… But Eva was and is real: the shock is inevitable. Artistic community and public opinion were massively against Irina; the first – which already classified his work as a parade of bad tastes – considered the collection as the apex of the absurd, that was simply not art. The public, in a long-awaited and recurring opposition, decried her, alleging an explicit lack of morality.

None of this, of course, would prevent Eloge de ma fille from entering the history of photography and eroticism. Even today, in which we live in times of such intense traffic of pedophilia material, times that perhaps cloud our vision for certain fascinating aspects of the bizarre or the cruel, the photographs that Irina Ionesco took of her daughter remain inadvertently full of the same concept, of the same search for the nature of being a woman seen through the years that pass to Eve and reveal her as or more terrible (and terrible use in the sense of astonishing) than Nobokov’s Lolita.

Source:

Mme. Ionesco: the lady of eroticism

Eva under the eyes of Irina Ionesco: from 5 to 10 years old

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Julie Five

By Lucretia Dalencourt

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Gianna Gulik

By Lucretia Dalencourt

Gianna Gulik (70 of Discordia, 3066 YOLD) Is the stage name of Katrina L. Salen, award-winning pornographic actress from Dervenin. She started her artistic career singing in a bar in Dervenin, until she was hit by 5 lightning one stormy night.

About what happened, Gianna comments the following in her plagiarized autobiography:

“I was 19 at the time, I had never had sex with any man. The lightning strike was a shocking experience, but those lightning bolts passing through my body taught me the pleasure of the phallus. It was my first orgasm.”

After the traumatic experience, Gianna underwent several surgical procedures to recover the burned body, but the needy hospital that treated her only managed to glue fragments of discarded advertising pieces to cover the injured body.

This was the beginning of a difficult time for Gianna, who was fired from the bar where she worked, and only managed to recover after joining a circus of horrors run by an eccentric Chinese man who later married her.

After her husband’s death, Gianna collected for herself the fortune she had gained from her inheritance, closed the circus and went to follow her dream of entering the pornographic industry, a dream that she had come to have after the experience with the rays.

Noticing that she didn’t attract attention due to her deformed body, Gianna glued silicone buttocks to her body. The success was immediate, and in the same year Gianna was part of more than 23 films, all of them aimed at a small audience (whose major concentration is, by chance, in Dervenin)

When asked recently what plans she had, now that she had a successful career in the porn industry, Gianna replied, “Oh no, I know, I’m going to have tea, I like tea”

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