Porno Chic
Lyz Parayzo
Opening on Thursday, May 6, 2021
Exhibition until June 12, 2021
Second exhibition of the Brazilian artist Lyz Parayzo in the spaces of the gallery Espace L, PORNO CHIC brings together works from different moments of his young career. There are two photographs from the Secagem Rápida series of 2015 (his first series to be censored in an art exhibition), a video entitled Papai está descansando of 2016 (based on the artist’s reading of the Contra-Sexual Manifesto by the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado) and the carved aluminum sculptures from the Bixinhas, Móbiles and PopCretinhos series. These last works were realized, for part, during an artistic residency in the city of Porto in October and November 2020 as well as in the workshops of the École Supérieure Beaux-Arts de Paris. By crossing different languages such as video installation, screen printing, sculpture and photography, the artist seeks to renew his critical reading of modernist traditions in prism, more narrative and biographical, questions of gender and identity policies.
PORNO CHIC. The title refers us at first glance to the vocabulary of contemporary visual culture. It is reminiscent of the fashion universe of the 90s adopting an aggressive advertising strategy by the use of images whose transgression was immediately converted into a weapon of mass seduction. The expression circulated when the American stylist Tom Ford takes back the creative head of an Italian luxury brand (Gucci, not to name it) and partners with photographers Mario Testino and Terry Richardson to develop advertising campaigns based on erotic clichés, in sophisticated pauses with often phallocratic connotations. The comments of the time (for Yves Saint Laurent, «chic porn is ignominy») made the observation of an absorption by the dominant culture of images coming from the pornographic proliferation favored by the circulating images of digital networks. The trademark of «chic porn» ended up objectifying the female body in the tacit alliance between economic liberalism and commodification of sexuality (we will speak, like Brian McNair, of «pornification» of the Western culture). At first glance, chic porn, as a commercial strategy of transgression, has nothing to do with sexual inclusion, women’s rights and racial minorities.