Seducing the Viewer
Monica Colbert
The intense, sublimated eroticism of Jehan Legac’s art is based on a manipulation of the body induced by a synthesis of reality and fantasy. The body, in Legac’s work, is an assertion of sexual signals and a flaunting of pagan spectacle.
Behind Legac’s celebration of sexual honesty are complex revelations of society and individuality. Commencing with the dawn of Judaism, Western society has maintained an uneasy relationship with sexuality. Society, as a collective that adheres to a system of values regulating behavior, has adapted a moral perspective on sexuality dictating a separation between sex as a natural and necessary social convention and sex as pure pleasure. The accepted moral perspective of Western society becomes problematic when the supposed balance between the two is agitated by individual deviation. No matter how stabilizing societal pressures might be, sex and eroticism retain an unparalleled strength, capable of bending the individual will to its designs and obsessions.
Fortunately, art doesn’t subscribe to societal conventions but rather individual taste and interpretation. Legac’s work reflects this, refusing to accommodate or reconcile sexual norms, and instead magnifies his own desires with a full catalog of exploitive measures. One such measure is Legac’s obliteration of personal identity. His subject’s facial features are either absent or distorted beyond recognition. The union between the viewer and the subject becomes impersonal, rendering an emotional disconnect. This dramatizes the sex as sex; the urge, the intrigue, the overwhelming desire.
Jehan Legac’s presentation and process alike oscillates between experience and perception, fact and fiction, realism and fantasy. In terms of presentation, his use of digital imagery creates a fantastic, if not surreal, realm. Legac cites dreams as an influential factor. He calls his subjects "digimates," referring to the digitalized images of women he visualizes "when escaping reality and sliding into a new fantastical world." "The [internet] is full with all kinds of erotic images but I could not find [the] special cocktail of nudity and eroticism I was looking for." The dreamy "digimates" that appear in the valley between wake and sleep, seem to suggest the notion that an idealistic experience, sexual or otherwise, can only exist just beyond the grasps of reality.
The subjects, though digitalized, are meant to be real according to Legac. "You meet them everyday," he says. "Every one of these creatures has a biting heart as well as sensibility. These women must survive our tough world and I love to make them beautifully smart and attractive."
Thus, Legac begins his journey in realistic terms. The starting-point of his work is his photographs. He then layers these images with shading and color to modify the outlines, creating a new silhouette. These images then see additional treatments such as "solarization, embossment, pixelizing, edge detection, filtering and blurring." He continues: "Once the photo has weathered all these treatments, it is not done with yet. Brush strokes are introduced, bright glowing cradles of colors are added, and an array of little tricks thrown in so that it seems to blur the line between photo and painting."
"These procedures appear in these artworks as imprintings that, far from being superimposed unto the photo, are rather peeled off it, as layers of subsequent meanings and levels of initiation that laid concealed beneath the surface of the portrait and that had to be taken off, revealed, sliced away, dried out, and exhibited. And then, once the whole gamut of all these concealed strata has been zipped out and made available, it is regarded as fit to be put at one’s disposal to make of this collection whatever one whims."
For Legac, photography’s ability to "capture an elusive meaning nested within reality and make it finally apparent" is manipulated to further "interrogate that reality and get out of it much more than its early confessions." Legac’s arrival at his daring style and aesthetic is philosophically driven by the pulls of fantasy and reality as well. Legac’s interest in erotic subjects came about as a result of fear. "I felt danger all around," he confesses. For Legac, having sex with a stranger was tantamount to going to war. "You could be lucky one day and come back home after having a great sex adventure, but it could also be the beginning of your end," he states. AIDS is like a predator gaining victories in the battlefield and too many people are dying because of their need to share love with others. "I decided to paint my dates and my phantasms and I became a pixels lover…"
Jehan Legac’s willingness to defect from rigid definitions and traditionally acceptable perceptions of sex and eroticism liberates us all in terms of sexual expression. As an active viewer to his art, one may decide to indulge and enter into the beckoning work, entering Legac’s fantastic world of desire and dreams, accepting the subject as lover.
