From ancient Athens to 1920’s Paris and beyond, one of the most common tropes in western art history is the figure of the bathers. Artists have presented bathing in a myriad of different ways including intimate scenes of women washing themselves, communal baths of the past, and figures en plain-air frolicking by rivers and beaches. There is something pleasurable and celebratory about the trope, from the private rituals of bathing sumptuously depicted by Degas and Bonnard, to the groups of bathers in various states of undress captured by Cézanne and Seurat. Whether they are titillating, voyeuristic or allegorical, these scene’s primary focus is on the human body, sexuality and the question of what attracts us.
Artists today continue to work through this tradition and beyond the frontiers of traditional figurative representation. Christophe Lennox’s take on this theme is based on the male bathing pools in Hyde park, and the 1940’s homosexual and forbidden qualities he associated with it. He investigates his identity and sexuality in these works, through memories of lovers in secluded spots by the water, of long summer days by the sea, drinking wine, reading poetry and swimming naked. These abstracted scenes are infused with pleasure and carefree decadence, where nature is not perceived through its different surfaces and forms, but through an interplay of contrasts, patterns and colour planes.
Text by @isca_gallery
Photo 1 @asvisdal
Photo 2 & 3 @siobhanbeasleyphotography
Quietly my favourite place thus far. (Reposting because Instagram cropped the images the first time around.)
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#fujifilm #xe4 #carlosandblow #rainbowbeach
