Ilias Papailiakis has been working in a Don Quixotic quest to compete with the historic masters of painting. The romantic vanity is every now and then penetrated by fragments of a personal narrative that mocks formalism and oozes out of the primed canvas into “real” life. Such is the case of his composition of two males fist-fucking. It is both an iconic miniscule monument of homosexual erotics and a tender rendering of contemporary affection. The two bodies are interlocked and the head of the penetrator almost rests on the buttock of his lover-receiver. The earthy skin tones of Papailiakis’s painting, often found in early Renaissance works, clash with the saturated, pornographic flesh tones of today’s erotica. This anachronism highlights the impossibility of a true meeting of the two affections, the body of painting and the body of the lover. How deep is the love? How deep is the love for painting? How anal is the obsession with history?

#painting #anal #erotica #paintingmasters #arthistory #obsession #fisting

photos: Nysos Vasilopoulos, 6th Athens Biennale 2018 ANTI