Reddened cheeks, shiny lips, erect penises – the motifs in nude paintings in art and in film stills from porn movies are the same. But what is the difference between sexual depictions in art and pornography? Thai Ho Pham addresses this question in the continuation of the series “Selfish Tits and Selfish Cocks”.
Thai Ho Pham uses the internet for his pictures. He scours porn portals, saves image clippings and uses art critic Jerry Saltz’s Instagram account as inspiration. Here he finds nudes from all eras of art history, from medieval woodcuts to contemporary collages. The focus is always on the nude.
Using a simple image editing program, the artist superimposes porn images and works of art, reworks them and then prints them on canvases. They blend together to create new, independent nudes in which there is no longer any difference between porn and artwork. Thai Ho Pham paints each printed canvas with bright oil colors and adds the final brushstroke that makes it a masterpiece and unique.
It is the in-between states, the blending of opposites that leads to comparison and interplay that fascinate the artist. It is not only the juxtaposition of top-class works of art history and pornographic images from the Internet, Thai Ho Pham also shows the double standards in the social acceptance of sexuality. Reverently admired as a masterpiece, ostracized as pornography but consumed in secret. By combining and detaching pornographic images from their context, he elevates them to the status of art and the resulting works to a new form of nude painting.
The juxtaposition of opposites also plays a role in Thai Ho Pham’s sculptures. Thai Ho Pham combines his work as a tattoo artist and his work as an artist on silicone hands, which are used by budding tattoo artists for practicing. The artist sticks peel-off tattoos with motifs from art history onto the tattooed silicone skin. The fleeting nature of the adhesive images and the permanence of the tattoos are thus juxtaposed. The seriousness of the tattoos engraved into the skin contrasts with the childlike decals. In the sculptures, the proximity to the ready-made is striking: Craftsmanship and service meet the creative free spirit of an artist.
What unites both positions is the unusual combination, the blending of opposites, the lifting out of the context and thus the creation of an independent work of art, which is crowned a masterpiece with the artist’s finishing touches.