Saturday in the galleries: the fragile male body
Evan Penny, Lee Miller
I do apologize for writing about an exhibition that just closed, but I’m sure you’ll come across Evan Penny’s work elsewhere very soon. Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror at Blouin Division Toronto was An Experience. I sometimes forget, because I spend too much time before screens, that art, physical, figurative art, can be an unsettling experience. Marsyas is, no other way to put it, disturbing. Nominally about the satyr Marsyas and his punishment at the hands of Apollo, the collection is a much broader spectrum of themes around mortality and human flesh and how these figure in the history of Western painting.
Marsyas, in mythological rendering, challenged Apollo to a music competition and lost - and was subsequently tied to a tree and tortured. It’s the hubris and rebellion punished, but you can always read this in the Nietzschean key as the classical, measured, reasonable, proportion-loving Apollonian principle fighting off the messy, unkempt, animal-like Dionysian. There is a statue to Marsyas in the Capitoline Museums in Rome which is… fairly Apollonian: Apollo won so fully, he even controls the means of visual representation.
Evan Penny works from inside the Dionysian, I thought: it’s as if the idealized classical forms were reproduced by a wicked Pan. Penny’s Marsyas has hair, his flesh is aged and discoloured, the animal parts of him salient. He looks like a piece of meat hanging off a hook - the way humans see animals, and animals other animals they eat, made visible.
