Jehan Legac
Rachel Abramovitz
Before I was born–before my parents gave fate hostages and gave up their independence–two men met at the old St. Regis waiting for Dali. One would become my father, the other would live, and still lives, out his life as one of the few for whom youth nor immeasurable wealth was, is, or will ever be, wasted. The other man was Oscar. Oscar knew everyone. To live in his world was to live in a world where shirts buttoned down the back–and didn’t button at all without the aid of a dresser–and if traveling with a personal dresser, a chef and various other attendants weren’t surreal enough in the age of electronics, then waiting on a Pop art assassin made certain it became so.
Dali was shooting canvases at the time–preferring the revolver to the brush despite, or perhaps to spite, his ambidextrous ability to transform the average camel or ubiquitous pocket watch from the ordinary to the extraordinary–preferring to become more representative of what we think of today as Dali than anything even a patron of deep pockets might hope to purchase or possess.
And it is the story of that lunch that I was reminded of when I first set eyes upon Legac’s work.
In this new age of digital media, you too can visit his website, www.jehanlegac.com, and see what I have seen from the comfort of your chair–in an age of body searches and subway bombs, you too can safely traverse the fluffy dream world that is Legac. Legac’s world is all about your comfort. Think Nagel and Vargas. HBDTYML is a utilitarian factory-boxed and sealed Helena, a Kubrick Milk Bar babe beheaded. Forged of Formica and neon, a Creamsicle laced with emasculated opium. Don’t worry your pretty little head, she can wait as long as you need for the Viagra to kick in.
Legac’s Up to You: From the slicks and swirls of a batiking vat emerges the goddess presaged by Vargas, heir to Botox and hip implants and skin grafts, averting her gaze, obscuring her nipples so that you–yes even you–might feel welcome at the altar, all the while begging the question, the rude question: Is that a cunt or a cock bulging beneath her studied flattened palm?
Fruit Fiction is Eastern porn and Western sensibility cushioned in cotton candy and hobbled boots, the whore and the schoolgirl leave us to wonder whether it’s for our benefit that the fruit obscures her sex even as her nimble fingers pull back her panties–are we not worthy, are we not ready?
Legac’s technique is superior to his vision. But to deconstruct his work is to devalue it in ways it doesn’t deserve. Just sit back and enjoy the ride–because in Legac’s world there are no dangerous curves ahead. As the Coney Island barker, so too is he–are you tall enough to reach the marker? Welcome aboard. En mass and without pretense come the women of quicksilver without the toxins–sado-masochism without the pain, bondage without subjugation, adolescence without the menstrual blood.
Legac is anything but dark. In his deft hands all that is complicated about sex melts away and what we are left with is a fantasy suitable for that talk you’ve been meaning to have with your son about the birds and the bees.
Here is a world in which tongues taste but never chastise. We can behave, as in Almodovar’s Talk to Her, without regard for consequence–tomorrow will never come–those ropes you wear won’t leave a mark. We are Bataille’s "dirty" without complicity in the rise of Franco–we are welcome to suckle the teat of the 50-foot woman without the hazard of height–we can separate and partialize and trivialize and dip our wicks in the fairer sex without emerging slick with the muck and the mire of emotion–like disappearing ink in his world, you can have your cake and eat it too, never staining your shirt.
No matter how dark the tunnel of love, in Legac’s world you’re never more than a breath away from the next Starbucks. Your latte tastes the same here as it did last time. And in an age of uncertainty, there is something oddly comforting in this.
