These works are striking because through all the sampling, decomposition and recomposition, they manage to maintain a certain familiarity and gravitas through the use of classical techniques like charcoal rooted in the academic exercise of nude model drawing.
Anatomical depictions of the male body have a complex history. Greco-Roman artists had a certain ideal of realistic but harmonious bodies. The Renaissance became more clinical with artists breaking religious taboos on autopsy and dissection in order to better capture anatomy from the inside out. The 19th century witnessed the invention of photography together with traveling shows of circus strong men which evolved into the post war bodybuilding culture and today the Instagram-filtered spectacle of our bodies on social media. From slightly disturbing clinical representations to “a world more in harmony with our desires”, our own flesh is both an ideal and a reminder of our actual materiality. A theme that Elliot Purse is exploring in his works expanding on his earlier XXL series.
The series started as a reflection on the representation of “strong men” in the American pop culture of Purse’s formative years, made of the theatrics of pro wrestling TV, bodybuilding magazines and comic books superheroes. In this new development, he is pushing further the examination of how malleable male bodies can be: they are hypertrophic, heavily modified but also deconstructed as parts and components and reassembled. These works are striking because through all the sampling, decomposition and recomposition, they manage to maintain a certain familiarity and gravitas through the use of classical techniques like charcoal rooted in the academic exercise of nude model drawing.
Purse’s techniques echo works which are now part of the Western art canon, however his decontextualization of those limbs and body parts breaks free from what Marcel Duchamp famously called “retinal art”, offering a dynamic interaction between almost photorealistic representations and cultural symbolism. Purse presents these images literally “detached” from their original reality, for viewers to reconcile with their own representations of masculinity and the shifting societal ones.
