Curious Affection is an apt title as the work has a strong focus on the relationship between Patricia Piccinini's creations. Typically each piece comprises two or more hyper-realistic and peculiar creatures, with its composition focusing on their relationship.
Piccinini makes rather beastly creatures look innocent, tender, and gentle. More importantly, recognisable. She does this by employing familiar signs of life: wet eyes, flushed cheeks, and tiny blue veins. The closer you get to the work the more realistic it looks; you can’t detect the materials used. Instead you see pores and terminal hair growth. So from a technical perspective her work is impeccable, and conceptually it prompts interesting questions about the nature of existence.
One piece exhibited mammal characteristics like fur and human limbs, but had an almost aquatic form. It’s here you marvel at Piccinini’s ability to make what is just a fleshy deposit with no face, look sentient somehow, and seemingly able to form a connection with the other creature in its proximity. It prompted Heideggerian questions about the nature of existence, and how we recognise existence in the Other.
The exhibition also points out how absurd beauty standards are. Piccinini creates beasts that look like us in specific ways, beasts that we can’t help but recognise. Some of her creatures even reflect a sort of cracked mirror conception of a human. Within the animal kingdom humans are not the most beautiful or elegant creatures. We have large limbs, and big heads, and we don’t have an attractive gate like other animals. By comparison, humans are pretty ugly. Piccinini confronts us with this truth by converging beastly characteristics with familiar human characteristics -- to conclude that perhaps we are further from the beauty ideal than we think.
By Madison Mamczur
Curious Affection will be at GOMA until August 5 2018, and it’s worth checking out
Image: Patricia Piccinini, The Couple