Robert Russell: The Greatest of Pains
The paintings in this series allude to religious ecstasy in Baroque painting but depict an entirely different kind of rapture. These paintings display a compressed space where both spiritual and sexual transcendence are given equal status. A series of displacements serve to locate ecstatic transcendence within the space of the body. The paintings in this series depict moments where the body advances beyond its capacity to be repressed. Painting has traditionally been employed for the revelation of such internal states particularly in the Baroque period. The paintings show a number of both men and women at the moment of orgasm and display the involuntary or ecstatic gestures produced by such internal sensations. These moments that have been isolated from a website for depiction are painted with oil on canvas in a variety of sizes. While the paintings explicitly refer to the Baroque they candidly present the non-erotic, contorted and even painful appearance of the body. Terror and ecstasy, pleasure and pain, high-art and Internet porn are conflated here and bare the resemblance of these ostensibly distinct moments. In this series the paint, mannered brushwork and the documentary source material (internet porn/imagery) all surface in an overall environment of excess.
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