Giraffe-like women. A gust of wind with its mane trailing behind like comet’s tail, a horse sat atop. Or perhaps a man named John who has wings for ears? All these figures and more are brought to life in the paintings of surrealist painter and writer, Leonora Carrington, and in her children’s book, The Milk of Dreams. Carrington’s stories of fantastical characters are the central informant of the International Art Exhibition at this year’s long-delayed, eagerly-anticipated Venice Biennale. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, The Milk of Dreams features 213 artists from 58 different countries, spanning over 100 years of art history.
“How is the definition of the human changing?” asks Alemani in her statement on the exhibition. “What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?” She further outlines three guiding themes for the exhibition: “The representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.”
Of the International Art Exhibition’s 213 artists, 180 will be participating in the fabled Biennale for the first time, with 1433 works and objects on display, and 80 new projects specifically made for Venice’s major art moment—in fact, the oldest formal art fair in Western history. Flaunt sat down with select artists Chiara Enzo, Felipe Baeza, Giulia Cenci, and Sara Enrico to discuss their works at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Chiara Enzo. “Torso” (2018). Courtesy the artist; Zero…Milan. © Chiara Enzo.
Chiara Enzo hones in on the specific—her brush strokes evade wholeness in an embrace of fragmentation. The Italian artist holds both a BA and MA in Fine Art, having studied in Italy and England, and has exhibited in galleries across Italy, such as A plus A gallery. By depicting such intimate and vulnerable pieces of the body, Enzo leans into tensions elicited by the obsessive gaze of the observer. Using the slow, intentional practices of drawing and painting in pastels, she delves further into the obsessiveness of the gaze, inviting the viewer to consider Enzo’s own dissection and reinterpretation practices. Her work thus interrogates the relationship between the Self and Other and parses out the meanings communicated—and misinterpreted—between the two.
Enzo’s “Torso” is no exception. She depicts a close-up of a woman’s torso, showing nothing beyond a glimpse of her neck and a few wisps of brunette hair. The observer is drawn in, left with no choice but to fixate on the intimacy of the body.
You often paint fragments of bodies—as seen in “Torso.” What are you hoping to explore or comment on by honing in on a specific body part in quite an intimate way?
I am interested in exploring vulnerability—a condition that I feel can be used as a key to enlighten many aspects of our nature. Feelings of fear and love, attraction, repulsion, violence, and beauty, I think, all stem from a deep state of vulnerability. “Torso,” like all of my paintings, is a depiction of a subject’s body just as well as being of someone’s gaze. That gaze comes from my own inner feelings of helplessness that I have always experienced towards the world— the impossibility of finding a meaning that can keep everything together, without contradictions. For me, the only way to grasp some truth in life is to explore it—not from a wider point of view, but rather from the close-up, to get some truth or some beauty from the encounter. That then opens up the possibility of putting all those small fragments together to make sense of things. Not like a puzzle, which will always give you the same complete solution in its final image, but rather as characterized by a constant sense that something is still missing. I have always used drawing as one of the main means to explore and understand the world in these intimate interactions. To me, the act of observing, and of making a work, is a point of contact—much like a physical touch. I feel I have to get closer and closer to what I’m interested in, and in doing so, strip the subjects of their unnecessary elements, until reaching their limits: their skin.
How do you explore the [perhaps male, perhaps not] gaze that is intrinsic to the viewing of your art?
I don’t, or at least not consciously so. I’ve never been overly preoccupied in my own work with the idea of the male gaze, because that which resonates with me the most, that of greater urgency, has always been reconstructing my own personal gaze or, if not my own, that of the subject(s) represented—often close friends. This is because I would like to obtain an incredible sincerity in the gaze, one that can contain in its specificity its unique complexity. It’s not really in my character to problematize sexuality into a binary state—that of ‘male’ and ‘female’ dichotomy. For me, putting a ‘male’ or ‘female’ gaze never feels completely or properly sufficient, but rather something to overcome.
The Milk of Dreams theme deals with bodies in transformation. How, if at all, does your contribution tie into this idea of metamorphosis?
When I talk about the body, I am not thinking about it as an object—a body is not (just) a piece of meat. It’s alive, feeling, perceiving, as well as having felt and having been perceived. It’s the core where existence takes its place and time, along with its incommensurable energies and mysteries. I deal with bodies that see and are seen, in a fragmentation of points of view where identity is challenged and undermined, and which demands the viewer be reconstructed. I’d like to conceive my work as a generator of questions rather than a provider of statements.
The Biennale’s curator, Cecilia Alemani, made a point of selecting primarily female and gender non-conforming artists, marking an intentional (and long overdue) shift from centering men’s artwork, both throughout history and in the contemporary art world. How does it feel to be featured as such, in your home city?
I think that such a shift is much needed and has been awaited for a long time, and I am certainly proud to be part of it. I’m aware that the contemporary art world is perceived as an enclosed circuit that often struggles to communicate with the larger mass culture, but all the same, I do hope it will help plant some seeds to induce some long-lasting effects on our society. I believe it is particularly important that this event is happening here in Italy, where I feel that there is even more work to do.
Felipe Baeza. “Por caminos ignorados, por hendiduras secretas, por las misteriosas vetas de troncos recien cortados” (2020). Photo Ian Byers-Gamber. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Felipe Baeza.
Felipe Baeza works in the realm of memory, making visible those historically, and currently, rendered invisible by the powers that be—those who govern others’ bodies. The Brooklyn-based artist was born in Guanajuato, Mexico and holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale. There, he studied painting and printmaking, skills he employs in his techniques of collage and ‘decollage,’ a praxis through which he challenges dominant binary narratives—including those of migration and displacement. He does so through his boundary-disrupting depictions of queer and racialized bodies, branches often budding from the figures themselves—an exploration of the violence inflicted upon such bodies, but also of the potential for transformation and renewal.
The artist has exhibited in group shows across the US such as Desert X, at Company Gallery, and more, and has helmed solo shows in New York at Fortnight Institute, Los Angeles at The Mistake Room, and London at Maureen Paley. His work is also part of the graphic identity of the exhibition’s imagery.
The title of your piece taps into the idea of connectors, introducing concepts of paths and veins. Where does this piece lead the viewer; what connections might it invoke?
Something I haven’t really expressed in detail is the source of my titles. They are often lines borrowed from my readings of contemporary writers that influence the objects I create. They include writers such as Gayatri Gopinath, Edwidge Danticat, and José Esteban Muñoz. The title of this work is a line from the poem, Décima Muerte, written by Xavier Villaurrutia. This work is also part of an ongoing series in my work that took off in 2018. The works in this series are meant to have us think about the many lives that have perished through forced migration—imagining those individuals still thriving through different forms. I would add that these works are responding to questions I wrestle with, such as, will we ever find a home in this place, or will we always be adrift from the only homes we have known? I am also trying to think through ways on how to refuse transparency and knowability required of queer, racialized, and migrant bodies that is a precondition of their regulation, surveillance, and capture.
You’ve created an abundance of works in the past that depict plants sprouting out of people’s mouths and bodies, which seems to point toward a simultaneous growth and destruction—how might one parse out this tension in this piece?
The tension observed in these figures could be a response to the destruction from their lived environments, but I don’t tend to think about these works in relation to destruction. I am thinking more about how these figures managed to thrive within constraints and enclosures. I’ll add that this series is part of the larger project in my practice which is centered on concepts of mythology, and the “fugitive body,” or the hybrid body—the immigrant and the racialized and the queer—which is forced to occupy and adapt to multiple spaces, and do so in an organic manner. Tied to this are other ideas that help me explore the effects of displacement, the ways the human body is remade to survive. As such, my work exists in the interstitial space between the real and the imaginary, but also offers the viewer a return to the places, histories, and visions of a past that might be forgotten.
As you’ve mentioned, you frequently interrogate the ways in which hegemonic power enables people to govern racialized and queer bodies. How would you describe the power relation between the central figure and the two busts on either side in this work?
The color and use of texture in my work functions as a trap to pull the viewer in, and as the work begins to reveal itself, it forces the viewer to engage with such topics of displacement, sexuality, and belonging. It is affirming to experience art that is about our reality, and of what is familiar—it is important to reach those viewers that have a different lived experience. This becomes a point of meeting for various viewers to engage in meaningful kinds of dialogues around the themes in my work. As for the role of the central figure and the others in this work, they are meant to transgress fixed notions of being that are required by the state/ law. The figures are meant to pursue a radical imagination and enact practices of freedom in confinement— to be able to reclaim a queer futurity that values differences over sameness, resists assimilation, and embraces incompleteness.
Your piece breaks the confines of a conventional understanding of ‘the body,’ in keeping with the goal of The Milk of Dreams—to challenge definitions of both ‘the human’ and ‘the body.’ Do you see your work as contributing to this provocation? How so?
While the body has always been central to my practice, I really enjoy the illegibility of my work. I make figurative collage paintings, but they border abstraction as well. You can’t really take them in through photos, as you can if you were standing in front of them. My paintings are often referenced as beautiful, but I think about beauty beyond aesthetics. A beauty that is emancipatory and that can uplift people from the circumstances they are prescribed. These ideas are part of the ongoing dialogue in my practice, as far as how I am thinking about the body—a body becoming something else and always transforming and adapting to new settings to survive and thrive. I am excited to see this work in the Arsenale exhibition space. I created this work in 2020 for a solo show at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles that was quickly closed in response to the onset of the pandemic and has been quarantined in their storage space since then. There is something special to have its next showing be at the Biennale.
Giulia Cenci. “Figura che divora sé stessa (detail)” (2021). Photo Serge Domingie. Courtesy the artist, Museo del Novecento, Firenze. © Giulia Cenci.
Born and raised in the Tuscan countryside, Giulia Cenci lives and works between Amsterdam and Tuscany. The artist’s work revolves around repurposing unwanted materials, an inspiration that first began with the discarded farmyard machinery she witnessed growing up. Cenci studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, followed by St. Joost Academy of Art and Design, and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Since 2020, the artist has created large-scale sculptural installations for Museo MAXXI, Rome; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Panorama, Procida; and at Museo Novecento in Firenze. Accelerating time, adjusting and altering elements from everyday life to points beyond belief, Cenci brings her sculptures and installations to the state of the surreal—a true force of nature.
The notion of a figure devouring itself overtly points toward self-destruction—what was the inspiration for this visual?
The image has allegorical value. When I first drew a self-devouring figure, it was a moment I was deeply interested in the idea of mass production, prototype, food production, life production, and commercialization, and the way we reduce and exhaust the environment and our general habitat—both cities and nature— to get as many things as we can, in the shortest time, without reflecting about the consequences that such an action has. At the same time, the work refers to a kind of common fear—a sort of ancestral attitude that every life contains in itself. It’s somehow the acknowledgment that every action we take has a consequence of destruction. The awareness that every time we love, every day we live, every thing we eat or every time we make something, we are going to destroy a little bit of ourselves, and with it, a part of something which is necessary for our survival.
This became very clear to me when, after years of living in cities, I moved again to a rural area. There, living systems or lives (which, in the routines of most people, may be considered as part of our family, house, truly members of our community—think about the number of pets or plants invading our Instagram accounts) are considered as a mere product. Sometimes to the point that in order to produce it faster and cheaper, this kind of production can exhaust so much if the piece of land it needs to grow becomes infertile. Lifeless. Though this is exactly what we need to be born, grow, live–fertile land.
So this contradiction, this awareness of being so violent somehow towards our own existence, made me think of this kind of being capable of only devouring itself to the point of self-destruction.
The piece harkens back to your exhibition in which five identical animal-like figures are depicted eating themselves. What does the presentation of this single piece, as opposed to as part of a group, say about the individual versus the collective?
The idea of identical figures defining a group of multiples is related to the reflections I was making before. The way we live in the society nowadays, the way we are allowed to live (and the way we allow other species to live), to relate with others: through devices, platforms, infrastructures, or products that are somehow directing our way to act and think, made me see a society where individuals are brought to a state of silent similarity. Sometimes while browsing online, going to a supermarket, or taking a plane, I feel estranged to see that subjectivities and personalities are recluses in specific pigeonholes. I have the feeling that we can be whatever we want, but are defined by a very strict guideline that slowly is conditioning a freer approach, which I guess is more related to a wild and remote way to live. We can have a profile picture, we can choose it, but it is going to have a standard size. We can say whatever we want in a limited amount of characters. It is even more impressive when the topics or actions are very archaic... like when I see a birth, a death, a standard amount of food. An operating room or a stable where the little ones become a number, a pile of beings, or a mother (animal) whose milk is mechanically extracted to satisfy the needs of a multitude of beings who are not her children, and who are likely going to throw away 50% of that product.
Eating is one of the most interesting topics to me. We are made of what we eat, but most of the time we have no idea what is going to cross and make our bodies, while we have completely forgot- ten the way we have been capable of providing our survival. I guess that in this unconsciousness lies a deep state of alienation towards ourselves.
We follow the rules, we go to buy what we know we can eat. It often doesn’t matter what it is: a vegetable, an animal, a mussel. It is protein, vitamins, and carbohydrates. But what is extremely weird is that we never realize that behind these products there is something that makes us very similar to it: a birth, a breastfeeding, a death. And that’s the way in which these primordial events, common to every living being, are managed, resembling only an unstoppable assembly line. I guess this work has to do with that: a long series of living beings brought to a state of unawareness, to the point again of consuming themselves.
Your work tends to bridge states of decay versus growth and then metamorphosis against regression. What might you say about the importance of these dualities in our everyday life in the effort of moving forward? How might this relationship be important, or is it more of the idea that one can not exist without the other?
The feeling I have, which was somehow mentioned in my first response, is that it is intrinsic and common to all things—a sense or condition of decay and regression. This is part of the metamorphosis itself, which does not mean we can’t go on or let the ‘progress’ go on, but of course that the progress itself has consequences that are not always the most proper or salvific. We live in a time where we are scientifically aware of an immense amount of issues and behaviors we know we must stop now. We could even have the tools and the technologies to do it, but sometimes the progress of someone does not mean the progress of everyone or everything. I guess this is part of the game—it happens even in the wild, where we would not be led to think of the selfish behavior of one plant compared to the other. But actually, it is exactly like that, and in our developed and democratic society, it’s happening exactly the same. Though we never realize that the “immediate” has very different consequences in the long term.
There is a beautiful epigram by Zanzotto, an Italian writer and poet:
“In questo progresso scorsoio non so se vengo ingoiato o se ingoio.”
In this noose’s progress, I don’t know if I’m swallowed, or if I swallow.
Sara Enrico. “The Jumpsuit Theme” (2017). Photo Emanuele Domingie. Courtesy Pav Parco Arte Vivente, Turin. © Sara Enrico.
Sara Enrico is an Italian artist who lives and works in Turin. Her art investigates material surface in relation to the body, deconstructing the codes of painting and tailoring while experiencing “tactile proximity.” In 2021, she took part in Skroderider at Billytown, The Hague; Motion into Being at Austellugnsraum der Akademie der bildende Künste, Vienna; and “Streetscapes” at The American Academy, Rome. Additionally, her solo show The Jumpsuit Theme was exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Rovereto, Italy from July to November 2019, and at the Trade Fair Palace in Prague in late 2019. Mixing analog and digital processes with paint and textiles, Enrico’s abstract shapes connote the haptic and the anthropomorphous.
You’ve spoken about being interested in “evoking rather than representing.” Do you feel your works, and The Jumpsuit Theme in particular, evoke the human body/form?
In the idea of evoking something, I see a way to release vitality, to animate an object, a form, with an epidermal or a corporal sensation. Sometimes, this brings memories of bodies, but I would not define which kind of body. Perhaps it’s a suspended and in-between state of being a body, fabrics or clothes to be inhabited, or an abstract form that plays with textural and tactile details. Clothes are peculiar objects: they are flat until someone wears them. I came across, almost by chance years ago, a template for a jumpsuit, a figural construct that then became an inspiration for the sculptures in The Jumpsuit Theme. The T-shaped jumpsuit known as the “Tuta” was designed by the polyhedric artist, Ernesto Thayhat, in 1919—a simple cut, raw material, a universal garment you could do on your own. It’s an iconic object with a huge variety of meanings and social implications, and, for me, being quite abstract in the shape, it works also as a “tool” for making sculptures by modeling a technical fabric as a soft form- work, and then filling it with concrete and pigments for physical consistency. In that, I saw a way to record unintentional choreography through sculpture, to catch minimal gestures in precarious balance between stasis and suggested movements, sometimes intimate postures that a body adopts when it is relaxing, inactive, in a state between wakefulness and sleep...
The concrete casting itself gives a natural shape to the sculpture—the fluidity of the material runs and takes its space in the fabric kind of jumpsuit. It’s a process that cannot be fully controlled and that’s why I like it, as well as you never completely know which form and color you will get until the end. It’s a combination of casual and desired aspects. This transition is characterized by slowness that lends the sculptures different attitudes and moods—slow is the making, slow is the change of the state of the material that slowly begins to take shape.
The Jumpsuit Theme is composed of three parts in different figurations. What can you say of the interplay in viewing them together?
The very first sculptures of the series in The Jumpsuit Theme were realized in 2017 as outdoor permanent installations at Parco d’Arte Vivente in Italy, Turin, whereas two parts have been shown in 2019 at Mart Rovereto and the National Gallery Prague. These exhibitions were conceived as two acts—Intermezzo and Camerino—displayed in these museums almost simultaneously, whose names refer to the title of the works: the prints and the fabric installation. I feel having brought back a bit of my music background in this idea of the theme... I imagined a score activated from the formal qualities of the works, and the mutual relations they make visible or play with. I am very into the idea of creating an interaction among tailoring, architecture, choreography, and sculpture, crossing some painting references, and the space often takes a little role in this. In those exhibitions, the sense of waiting and disguise could allude to some performative attitudes toward the works—energies to be released, but also to the hybridizations of bodies, materials, the exchange of roles, and functions. I like the cohabitation of unrecognizable, ambiguous, deformed presences. Going back to your question, the only works I’ve shown separately, until now, are the concrete sculptures. And in Venice, you will find new pieces of them.
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