Thomas Szott: “Body of Art” (2022)

 

Thomas Szott, Beloved, 2022. Graphite, vinyl sticker and acrylic paint on paper, 55 x 65 cm

 

Through drawings, objects, sculptures and textual narratives, Thomas Szott risks revealing the autobiographical tenor of his visual poetics expanded beyond the pages of his diary. Through dissimilar languages, there is a central issue that is based on approaches to the body, its identities and subjectivations, where bodies represented and recognized as masculine do not expose the vigor of a masculinity understood as hegemonic, because they express their delicacy when they reveal precisely the anxieties generated by the social constructs that shape our desires, our dreams so crossed by a romantic structuring, therefore unreal.

Thomas Szott exposes different versions of himself by presenting either confessional autobiographies, or allegorical representations of his possible intimate desires that can be understood as trustworthy or totally idealized, where “the other” (as in dreams) is none other than the very person who imagine in his/her dream constructions.

The semantics of the conjuncture of the artist’s creations verify and, at the same time, deny the symbolic constructions so blatant in a cisheterocentric and masculinist culture, because by weakening masculinities in his symbolic compositions, not associating them only with the idea of virility and absolute robustness, Thomas makes a critical verification of what has always legitimized a dominant position of subjects who recognize themselves as male identities in our society, since the artist underlines in his creations how utopian the completeness of a hegemonic identity is that meets all the rigid requirements of cisheteropatriarchy, emphasizing that no one in the world fulfills it in its entirety.

We could deduce that in the case of representations of heterosexual male identities, it would be unmistakable that such awareness was evident from the beginning, but there are those who fall into the ambushes of the outdated cishomonorma and, fortunately, Thomaz Szott has the sensitivity to produce something that could not fit into it.

 

 

ARTWORKS

 

Details of some works shown in the Body of Art exhibition at Sput&Nik the Window. September and October 2022, Porto, Portugal