Carlos Saez – Human Appearance Optional (2017)

By way of explanation, Saez posits this piece as “a multiprocess collage inspired by morphological freedom and group sex.”

My first thought was that it was hentai adjacent–it’s hard to see tentacles in any sort of sexually charged context without immediately going there.

I didn’t pick up on the graphic depictions of sexual intercourse; the is-it-a-glazed-ceramic sculpture-or-2D-painting aesthetic makes the viscous fluid like masses look like a swirled mass of organs or perhaps organs modeled from oobleck.

What finally clued me in to the sexually explicit aspects was the rebar/vaccuum hose penetration in the third image from the top. From there on it’s a treat to follow the whorls, swirls and plasticine florishes. To see things as sexual, visceral (in the sense of viserca), effluvial discharge and then as piece of a collage. (For example: the abs in the final image are not the same as but remind me of the cover for Chuck Palaniuk’s novel Choke.)

The fluidity of these constructions resonates with a project I’m in the preliminary phases of researching. However, the more I look at it the more I’m realizing two things:

I’m really into psychedelia. I love psychedelics and am even more fond of music made to be more fully experienced in altered states. But psychedelic visual art leaves quite a bit to be desired. The fractals and DMT inspired spirit realms are interesting. Someone like Alex Grey has a fantastic sense of design and visual flow–but it all leaves me feeling like I’ve lived on nothing but Oreos and Mt. Dew for several days. It’s mostly eye candy with little if any sustenance. (If I wanna stare at fractals, I’ll jump down into an Islamic art K-hole.)

But what I realized about the above image is that in so far as it appears sculptural it actually has a fair degree of overlap with Rococo sculpture, actually. It’s partly the way Rococo was primarily decorative in nature, favored a pastel palette and emphasized serpentine lines and asymmetrical compositions. (And that strikes me as a shortcoming of most psychedelic visual art because there is a focus on symmetry as a means of parsing the load universe into cannon, aim at brain, pull trigger reality of the experience of getting really fucking high. In the process of writing this I’ve been looking at a bunch of rococo art and I think it’s actually more in line with the way I experience ‘visionary’ states.