In Bodies that Matter (2022-current), a new series of nudes merge with marine landscapes, everyday objects, and food: teacups, spoons and croissants, models of ships, mandarin peels, and shellfish. Explicitly fetishised, hyper-sexualised male bodies, represented in all their muscular tension, are even more objectified by the exclusion of the model’s faces, or disappear completely, suggested only by the presence of clothes. As the focal visual elements of the composition, the naked figure stands both as the backdrop and the point of attraction of the artificial objects, which orbit around the nudes, without following any coherent laws of physics. The series merges the art-historical genres of the still life and landscape painting with contemporary arts – in the first stance, nude photography and dance – in order to question once more the hyper-sexualisation, and objectification, of the male figure. The result stands at the crossroad between everyday experience and unconscious thoughts, lucid perception and libidinal daydreaming, queer playfulness and classical symbolism.
Elio Ticca is a contemporary artist working with painting, sculpture and installation. His work aims to investigate how the representation of affect can be conceptually and culturally deconstructed, as well as narrated in new plastic and visual forms.