Syzygy

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@lumierebelge, who also goes by Syzygy online. His art betrays an obsession with the female figure, arthropods, and occasionally, spaces. Here are a few of my favorite pieces by him which exemplify these fixations:

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@lumierebelge

He is one of my favorite artists to come across online. I love his soft, organic lines, and his pieces always have a bit of a confusing simplicity about them (those involving crude delineations of rooms are the most interesting to me for this reason). Something about his need to point out that this lady is in a room with that crab makes the first piece infinitely more thought provoking. I hope what I mean by a confusing simplicity comes across. Sometimes they also just introduce a novel enough aesthetic conflict -- dainty, naked, pale women and mean-looking, inhuman, skinny-limbed insects and crustaceans, often keeping each other company (this crab piece implies some enmity between the two figures, but most of his art does not presuppose that one is scared of the other). You don't see that a lot.

He is a gracile and slightly dorky young man whose features place him somewhere between Hispanic and Southeastern European in my eyes. He carries himself about pretty gaily in his pictures yet has an obvious fascination with women. It's probably safe to call him, approximately, a metrosexual. And speaking of sexual:

Instagram user @chernobyl.hearts recently asked me if I knew about Syzygy in response to one of my own pieces. I said I was a fan, and he sent me another one of his accounts, @treesforthetrees, whereupon my image of the artist immediately changed, first and foremost, to that of a complete pervert. Here are a couple of the pieces from this archive:

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@chernobyl.hearts

@treesforthetrees

I don't like writing about sex. I find it uncouth and -- since it's sinful anyway, what's the point of even talking about it, of intellectualizing it? I probably don’t like art about sex either, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t judge Syzygy for making these pieces. But this is the first explicitly sexual art I've seen that I couldn’t help but be interested in.

What I for some reason assumed was a disinterested fascination with the female figure suddenly yielded to true sexuality. That is not to say he can't also have such a disinterested appreciation for nudes (it's almost as if you can have both). My initial shock at the presence of sexuality subsided to give room for another shock: and what a garish sexuality! It was like the tension between the soft white underbelly of his female figures and his scary bugs suddenly boiled over into a horrifying and forbidden sex.

See the first piece. The male somewhat resembles a wasp, but it has a very insubstantial, wiry body consisting of little more than a penis attached to a spine attached to her spine. It gets all of its form from wrapping around the woman's. If you squint it looks more like a strange accessory the woman is wearing on her back than a lover, and there is the obvious parasitic connotation.

And the other piece: have you ever seen a less dignified depiction of a male lover? A headless dog (?) pouring blood from its stump all over a woman, purportedly still going at it like a chicken does for a few seconds following decapitation. The woman poised so elegantly, him wrapped stupidly and tightly around her, her looking elsewhere, he'd probably be drooling all over her back if it wasn't for the fact that his head was missing, which doesn't at all change his ability to want to have sex.

The male is reduced to a base and inhuman beast -- even the word beast sounds too much like a compliment, still seems to suggest something remarkable about him. A mosquito would be a better analogy. The male here is a phallus attached to a limbic system whose purpose is to find its way into a woman, the woman retaining all of her dignity and elegance, if maybe losing some to her proximity and implied need for these insectoid penises.

It reminds me of Zizek's idea that women's experience of sex is that of observing themselves having sex in third person, of narrativizing the act with a focus on themselves and not their lover. This art to me paints an image of women's sex as more dignified than men's. The man is almost parodied for how simple his experience of sex is (as little more than what leads up to climax), even if it is seen as more fulfilling, it is the fulfillment of a lower need -- and the feminine is vindicated as the true object of desire not only for men but women too. Just imagine, men's psychology as a mere instrument to allow for women's higher sexuality to be realized. The woman having sex, an art piece, and the man, the necessary mosquito, who is stupid enough to have a good time doing what he does. Men's experience of sex a corn syrup and women's, a narrative.

My English professor the other day suggested that Adam and Eve might have, fully disinterestedly, had sex in the Garden prior to the Fall, without shame and not for pleasure but for fun. In Syzygy's drawings, women's experience of sexuality today looks a little closer to that unintelligible disinterested, purely aesthetic sexuality than men's. It only looks, though. I don't believe there's room for disinterested appreciation in that particular area, in a postlapsarian world. In narrative, maybe, but not in sexual narrative, specifically because sexual narrative ultimately is always about yourself.

And Syzygy himself, drawing this! A man whose body looks more like that of the women in his paintings than the men. It's like he's saying, yes, I am, despite my biology, able to abstract myself from my masculine sexuality and appreciate the feminine as the tasteful one. In parodying the male sexuality he proves his awareness and humanity.