Regina Rex - 221 Madison St. New York, NY 10002

In companion with the exhibition: Yui Kugimiya and Fabienne Lasserre: Foreign Object

FOREIGN OBJECTS
by Yevgeniya Traps

It is voyeurism, this peeking through, looking underneath the layers, exploring the painting.
The appeal is in the peeling. The felt makes me want to touch the totem, the good
luck. Everyone knows everything looks better lined in fur. The beast tamed, prostrated,
conquered. The domesticated wild, the walk through the enchanted forest. The man hunts,
the man kills, the woman gathers, fruits ripen, the pelt keeps us warm. But there are always
the apertures, the cavities, cracks to look through and ponder.

This is the problem of the body. It is covered, and it is filled. It brims and bursts, bears and
burdens, bleeds and billows: connotations, intuitions, prohibitions, shames and sorrows
and forgiveness, transgressions and allowances, the personal, the political. Everyone knows
perfection is impossible. Still, we grid and gird and try to contain the overflow, the fleshy
protuberances. And maybe it is unavoidable, the need for softness, the longing for the
contained.

How to describe it? I was listening to a sad song one moonlit night, and it was absurd and
elegant. There were no stars, or very few, and I thought I might cry, weighed with the
loneliness of a city night, the beauty of a gloomy melody, the intimation of mortality. This
body will die, everyone knows. This body will disappear, absorbed by a world it cannot
bear. The corporal gives way to the corpse, the sepulcher. Rapunzel is locked in the tower,
and she is ancient now, wise and gray, her locks flowing into nowhere. Beyond saving, she
cultivates memories, wills the mind to ignore the body, unhinges the old hopes. Holding
on is useless�is it not?�when the links and the ties and the binds are so temporary.

The premonition glimmers through the beauty, preserved these mere moments by hide
and flesh, and then protrudes, splits the seams and joints, spilling, spilling, spilling.

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