[En la foto: Yeneia Elvira]
Contemporary art is diverse and carries in itself within its sometimes inapprehensible body the sense of polemic. Part of this effect is due to one of the practices that, although it is not contemporary, but rather dates back to the first civilizations, has managed to make more than one of its recipients blush: erotic art.
In Un trastorno o varios, by Cuban visual artist Yenia Elvira Barrios, from Pinar del Río, is one of those monuments that in some way, perhaps even out of place for these times, is capable of generating controversy, blushing a cheek or two. Seven paintings that make up the exhibition, enclose in a very self-referential way, the image of the artist. But not the calm, beautiful, peaceful, sublime image of the woman traditionally idealized in the most classical art.
Yenia Elvira exhibits herself, manipulates her image. She establishes a concomitance, a counterpoint between her figure, which she understands, that in her work functions as a symbol of the feminine and the icon, the image of the male phallus.
In each of the paintings, the artist shows herself close to a penis: holding it, throwing it, showing it, suggesting its erection. But it is not veneration, as in the ancients, that the artist exercises in relation to the universal symbol of the male image.
The artist, manipulating this symbol, alludes to deeper struggles of a personal and universal nature. She speaks of the empowerment of women, of their equality before men, of the progressive rupture of patriarchal hegemony, of the codes and traditional behaviors established when contemplating sexuality and sexual relations.
That is why she is not afraid to irreverently show herself in what I consider one of her most conceptually successful works, in the middle of the sexual act, penetrating a young man who bends his face, who hides his gaze from the observer, but according to the contortions of his body, seems to enjoy the very intimate act he is living.
Another of the works that shows her in one of the trends of contemporary art and that is a tacit image of the aesthetization of the private, is the one in which the artist shows her genitals and most intimate parts to the viewer or appears wearing a dildo as the most common of the acts.
The pieces that make up the exhibition Un trastorno o varios, by Yenia Elvira Barrios, exhibited at the Sala Real de la Asociación "Hermanos Saíz" in Pinar del Río, Cuba, are a true sample of the artist's search for a voice, for a seal, for the artist's appreciation of achieving a work that understands her contemporaneity, that translates it and returns it in the form of visual codes, of the manipulation of traditional referents related to the concepts of beauty, femininity or masculinity.
*The photos are from the personal gallery