the erotic breath of robert mapplethorpe

The fourth exhibition of the photographer artist arrives at the Elvira González gallery robert mapplethorpe (New York, 1946-Boston, 1989). The previous three took place in 2011, 2013 and 2019. Now, there are 28 medium format photographs, dated between 1977 and 1987, with a predominance of body portraits (mostly nude), flowers, a fragmentary view of an interior with a window at the background, and a plant mark of a wheat plant and its shadow.

This last question is significant because, in reality, all the images we can see here present a photographic game of contrasts between bodies, objects, spaces… and shadows. Something that is explicitly formulated in the title of the exhibition: praise in the shadowwhich refers to the meditation book by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) praise of the shadowpublished in its original version in Japan in 1933.

The reference is explicit on the room sheet, which contains the following quote from Tanizaki: “… I believe that beauty is not a substance in itself, but just a drawing of shadows.” At the end of his book, Tanizaki points out his desire to expand in literature or the arts the “universe of shadows” that we would be dissipating in current times.

Mapplethorpe's photographs leave us with a question mark in front of what we see

And I think that Tanizaki's writing about shadows speaks deeply to what Mapplethorpe's photographs convey to us, which go far beyond a mere simplistic reproduction of what we can see, to place us with a question mark in front of what we see, triggered especially with the game of contrasts in which shadows have a primary function.

[Mapplethorpe, the elegant artist who dressed in leather]

All the photographs collected are printed in black and white, which undoubtedly favors the concentration of representation and our gaze. In them, moreover, there is always an erotic breath, an open eroticism which is linked not only with the various manifestations of desire, but also with the vital impulse. In Mapplethorpe's photographs we also find, as in Marcel Duchamp, the intense association of living with eros: eros is life.

The core of what we see takes us to dynamism of human bodies, living bodies that, in their projections of light and shadow, with their expressive movements, tell us what they feel and what they do. This is for me the central question in Mapplethorpe's photographic proposal, which places him as one of the reference artists in the second half of the 20th century: bodies speak, we must understand their language.

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