A pain, a smell

A pain, a smell

A used deck set on a white museum base. The letters, routes, are images of muscular, manly men wearing sexy clothes with their sticks, erect, a sight. Flower and fruit stickers, pieces of insulating tape - reminiscent of black stripes of censorship - small bits of micropore paper, ink ink and scratches with increased pornographic composition. The intentional wear and tear of human-made images - produced in sexual products and consumed - into flowers that inhabit a garden of strong images treating fragile people. This is a pain, a smell (2019), the work of São Paulo artist Nathalie Bohm.

In the background, a poster. An enlargement of one of the cards. The enlarged model rocket humiliates every man who turns anything into a penis sized competition. Apparently, as women are more comfortable and willing to talk about hard dicks: demonstrating how fragile the masculinity version is. But perhaps there is even a nuisance that runs through all human beings at this work: the return to planarity imposed by poster printing.

Now what was unique and helpless in the image; what to invite to approach by its details; what he asked for a close look - approaching the guy like a hummingbird to a garden - in the letters: no poster, it is enlarged, illuminated, explained in the smallest detail. Without asking permission or apology, this great image reveals to the observer all that was once pure insinuation. The enlarged image shocks, sublimates a delicacy of the artist's collage and reiterates a rude original pornographic message. All textures and effects applied to the composition - flower stickers, wallpapers and time-of-use styles - are applied.

The erotic poster card returns the function of arousing a part of the bodies they look at: their pubes. The loving narrative constructed by Nathalie along and on the models, consciously or unconsciously explored, with no poster format engraved on the univocal pubic desire that also makes up life. Even if subjects are not encouraged to treat their cravings for social taboos, or the little-spoken de Everyday trenches of adulthood are a natural part of the sensations that make up the habit of breathing.

The union between the delicacy of sex and affection is in A Pain, a smell the denial of judgment that accompanies prejudice. In this way, the work creates an equity populated with distinctions in its terms. The history that leads to the materiality of the work demonstrates how the artist is more concerned with revealing the corners that each human being carries within than judging the individuals who allow themselves to be what they are:

With the rise of intolerance in Latin American governments in the distant year 2018, Nathalie decided to activate affection and solidarity through the sexual symbol. Thus, images that at the beginning of the twentieth century would be considered of personal and intimate interest are presented to the eyes of all awakening empathy and solidarity. More than that: reiterating that sex can and should be more than the image of intercourse, saying that sharing a bed is sharing touch, smell, taste, and murmur near the ear, almost as if vision , during the act, was a sense fragmented by the crack between the eyelids.

A pain, a smell also deals with a certain thorn in masculinity that can propose undefeated men, toxic because they are unable to admit their limits. In addition to returning to fragility through a smell - necessarily imagined when smelling the garden-orchard - the affections that tie everyone in a social bond. A willingness to understand the other next to you and, with them, to aspire to the acceptance of people without judging them by what their beds or their hearts inhabit.