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A WOMAN'S BODY, 2022

It was loved and hated, it was admired and despised, it was cherished and detested, it was desired and rejected, it was craved and disliked, it was abused and adulated, it was sold and bought, it was molested, raped, burned at the stake while it was glorified and venerated in hymns, poems, and art. I am not certain if there is anything more controversial and tormented on one hand and adulated on the other hand than a woman's body.

To muddle things even more, on top of all these atrocities, we also have the female beauty myth and all the beliefs associated with the notion of beauty. Not only is beauty just a notion, a concept, and as such it is not something universally valid or all-encompassing, but it is also time related, each century (or recently every decade) having its own criteria or rules of what beauty is and as a direct consequence how a female body should look like.

Being entrenched in the minds of some there is no wonder this myth time and again creates fundamentally unachievable standards, or for the achievement of which women often undergo difficult surgeries or hard-to-imagine torments. It is like a maleficent mind, with a quaint sense of integrity, had decided that too much wood had been consumed hence they should not be burnt at the stake anymore, for it is not modern, it is not civilised. Instead, they can be helped to abuse

themselves making them grateful or even happy for this physical and psychical trauma they have to endure.

God, why are men afraid of women? Just because they are different, and they don’t understand them and like any other being they are afraid of what they don’t know or of what they cannot comprehend?

How can men understand that women are beings of many parts? How can ever a man utterly comprehend and most of all feel the profound woman’s desire of being a mother, or the ecstasy of feeling another life growing in your womb? How can a man understand the deep sense of desperation if for whatever reason a woman believes she cannot give birth?

As such the expression of a women's consciousness is not fully understood by men nor are they able to understand the nature of such consciousnesses, which is why they interpret women’s behaviour according to their own beliefs among which the expression of sexuality is considered male, while the expression of love is not considered manly.

Yet, while love is the purest form of energy that binds together all the atoms, that keeps our bodies alive, love is also a biological necessity, a force that operates to one degree or another in all biological life. Without love there is no physical commitment to life.

Sexuality represents but one aspect of love and perhaps an important one yet if sex is perceived as the only expression of love, understandable conflicts arise. If this were not enough, many a good man have been taught to separate love and sex so that a schizophrenic condition results that tears apart their minds as they live their lives, for if one feels that sex is the only proper way of expressing love, and also believes that sex and love are divided, one finds oneself in a massive conundrum. And, conundrum here is far limiting a word.

With such an ancestral heritage of beliefs, with such a tangled thread of thoughts, there is little to wonder that women are misunderstood, loved but feared, adulated but mistreated. Yet when men manage to blend the female and male characteristics the seeming oppositions and contradictions disappear, when they do not allow sexual roles to blind them, they are apt to combine reason and emotion, intuition and intellect, and in so doing create concepts, create new beliefs that reconcile previous contradictions.

NOTES

The series comprises 18 artworks.

Medium: acrylic on cropped MDF boards, on artist's frames

Size: 122 H x 84 W x 3.5 D cm

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