Does representation have the power to shape its object? The answer was once obvious, but in today’s image-saturated culture, as the hackneyed phrase goes, to deal with the icon takes conviction. Lyse throws caution to the wind, confronting the image’s epigenetic consequences.
In clinically pornographic surround, the installation takes the classic female nude to its inevitable conclusion. If titillation was once the stuff of oil paint and the top-shelf magazine, the gallery now delivers it in OnlyFans perfection. Lyse’s barely clad women flex for the cameras, their poses optimised for maximum NSFW spell-bind. Ciccolina, the icon’s icon, performed at the show’s opening. No man’s desire has not been shaped by these apparitions.
In this barely fictional post-sex world, intercourse is a game of image veneration, its object divorced from old biological imperatives. Lips, tits, and cunts are the world, but men “race” their sperm under the microscope for kicks. IVF is GDP, and love is in surplus. In a Biennale under the spell of a dead woman, Lyse’s contribution is as morbid as it is vital. Eros is dead. Long live Eros.
