The Revision of Desire
Anthony Iacono at PPOW, NYC
Consider the work of the Surrealists or the painted cutouts of Matisse. Just think about it for a moment.
It’s nice, right? It could be described as elegant, modern in the twentieth-century sense, playful or psychological in nature. However, I wouldn’t say they necessarily excite or shock today. They’re canonical works, and will be preserved in the annals of art history. So, when you think that a young artist is riffing on these qualities, you may worry about redundancy. Yet in the case of Anthony Iacono, an artist who makes plenty of references, this doesn’t happen.
At his new show Talking to Strangers at PPOW Gallery in New York, Iacono uses facets of modernism as tools to create collages that are completely of the moment. Think of surrealism, collage, or Deco textiles as a means to an end. The “end” here being compositions that invoke variations of the queer imagination.
The images themselves are bizarre. You will see a thorny rose between the buttocks of a man in a singlet, a disembodied hand forcing a man to drink from a teacup, or someone’s nipple being outlined by another man with a pencil compass. Almost all of these figures consist of faceless bodies, and they all seem to be in different states of dress and undress. Obviously there is an implication of both real and imagined sex. The subject matter immediately bring up the psychosexual worlds of Salvador Dalí or Yves Tanguy, but these aren’t so wrapped up in André Breton or Freud. This show seems to be an exploration and embrace of hidden desires and fantasie, and less about the analysis of one’s mind.
Iacono is also a mender of of art history. We are familiar with the usual white, straight(ish) male perspective that ignores queerness, avoids positive representation of POC, and turns women into objects. Here we see the opposite taking place. The artist uses modernism’s stylistic tricks for his own gain, and it results in pieces that feel absolutely opposed to the usual treatment of queer impulses. It’s subversion at its finest, as well as its most erotic and strange.
