VENUS – CLAUDIO GARRUDO
«To me Art’s subject is the human clay,
And landscape’s but a background to a torso;
All Cézanne’s apples I would give away
For one small Goya or a Daumier.» W. A. Auden
Venus, besides being the second planet after the Sun, which feeds our whole planetary system, is also, and in this case especially, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. But when we think of the iconographic meaning of Venus, appears immediately, the image of the female figure and its intrinsic ability to fertility and pregnancy. After all, it is still the woman who possess this capability, formal and instinctively multiple, to continue and perpetuate the human specie.
This is precisely the question that Cláudio Garrudo intends to explore in this serie that photographs several women in a position to assume, implicitly or explicitly, her motherhood: who is this woman and where she has her sensuality and her natural strength, in a century marked by a supposed equality? Are we so far, or maybe not, from the Venus of Botticelli or Manet’s Olympia, which caused so much scandal at the time? The reclining woman, lying that Mondigliani represented so sexual admittedly and provocative, will have now, other meanings? ‘Venus’ explores, as a topic, the female body and its eroticism, in a phase allegedly and metaphorically gestativa. In this sense, it is coherent and consistent with the work of the photographer around the human body in its many complexities and formalities.
Ana Matos, gallerist and curator
