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Marcos Carrasquer is a Paris-based artist represented by Deborah Zafman Gallery.
Marcos Carrasquer, Carmela 2 (center part of triptych), 2007. Ink on paper, 20 x 26 inches. Courtesy of Deborah Zafman Gallery.As a thirteen-year old, messed-up kid, I used to make pornographic comics for my French teacher. In addition to getting me good grades in French, drawing obscene scenes of copulation provided me with real pleasure, especially when I succeeded at more or less accurate anatomy of my positive heroes. This just goes to show that only realistic rendering of the human flesh is able to arouse the pornographer. Therefore, photography, and moreover film, are much more effective means for pornographic purposes than drawing or painting are.
Even if Rembrandt’s Bathsheba or Ruben’s Hélène Fourment in Fur don’t stir a literal hard-on, they are nonetheless totally breathtaking and absolutely stunning in their rendering of the female flesh. Also their depictions are much more real and palpable than photographic or celluloid flesh. I would even say they are more gloriously “flesh” than the real everyday flesh that surrounds us.
In retrospect, I realize that the human figure is represented in all my paintings. My figures are very often represented as naked, and I guess that is the reason some people consider my work as erotic, though I prefer to think that I just like to paint knee caps, collarbones, thighs, and toes. Evidently, sex is always present. Unfortunately, death and destruction are never very far away. They loom around the carefree post-coital embrace–or worse–they simply brutally interrupt the act. I wish I were an erotic painter like Rubens, and I wish I could elaborate the triumph of flesh in painting. For now, there is essentially rage, a thirst of vengeance never quenched, a spit in the face of death-mongers, and black-dressed soul cannibals. Finally there is painting, the seventh-day labor.
