Open Edition "Triumph of Venus (after François Boucher)" Archival Fine Art Print

Open Edition "Triumph of Venus (after François Boucher)" Archival Fine Art Print

29.5 x 30cm archival matt fine art print on 230gsm white acid free paper

Signed

Arts complex and intrinsic relationship with beauty has already been discussed exhaustively. Many artists strive to capture beauty within their creations. Some possess the unique ability to unearth beauty in places others overlook, often facing criticism or censure for their divergent perspectives. Others, however, recognize that the very concept of beauty carries with it the burden of hierarchies, an implicit ‘ugly’, and the homogenization of a singular, canonized 'beautiful.' In response, they embark on a quest to subvert these traditional notions. Yet, one cannot escape the fact that even the act of attempting to convey what is beautiful implicates the artist in a historical narrative of an oppressive beauty, one particularly pernicious in its impact on women. In this regard, the portrayal of the female nude encapsulates all these complexities.

In 1740, François Boucher painted 'The Triumph of Venus', a saccharin scene of the goddess of beauty being celebrated nude on a rocky shore, attracting men and women, gods and other goddesses, floating cupids and swimming nymphs. Almost 300 years later, in 2023, Ishilla produced 'Triumph of Venus (After François Boucher)', a modern reimagining of its namesake. The artist’s recognised colour palette and curious, queer bodily subject matter remain, but both of these take on a new life here in a Rococo inspired painting that would not feel extraneous in The Wallace Collection.

Through their work up to this point, Ishilla has studied the (queer, female) body, and genitalia in particular, as both a natural thing and a sexualised thing, the object of someone else’s desire and the source of our own sexual autonomy and power, something in action and something for decoration, something being looked at and something looking back. However, these works have until now only looked at a snapshot of the body in a particular time and place, as something static and delineated. In Triumph of Venus (After François Boucher), the artist overcomes the constraints of the still image and portrays the socially constituted body, one that is tied to others and has a past and a future. The body is shown to be in relation and in motion; a nexus of other bodies and non-bodies with blurred imbrications. More than this, whilst the physical body is a finite object, the artist demonstrates that it is at the same time an infinite being. Like the sky and the ocean, it is unclear where it begins or ends.

In this sense, we are like the lady with the pearls in the bottom-right, peering around the corner of the painting captivated, as if looking behind a curtain that conceals the true nature of time and space from us. Staring at the painting gives the observer the feeling that finally, for a moment, we can step away from the interface that we call ‘the present’ and understand ourselves fully. It gives the sensation of looking into another dimension, and indeed we are, as the painting adds the social dimension of our bodies. In this dimension, nothing is as it seems to our crude, finite senses, with the shapes of vulvae and oysters interchanging.

The artist’s oeuvre is in part a feminist project to understand the bodies that endure gendered violence. This painting represents a step forward in this task, considering a social dimension in motion where bodies are exposed and vulnerable. Ishilla is a master of portraying a calm anger, most notably in Just a Boy (2021) and Fallen Angel (2023), and this is evoked here even despite the abstract form of the bodily edifice. Triumph of Venus (After François Boucher) contributes to a feminist philosophy that attempts to understand and describe our gendered reality in order to question accepted norms and power relations as part of a movement to end gendered oppression.

It seems significant then that this painting is based on François Boucher’s original namesake from 1740. It is also fitting that the artist uses an almost 300 year old painting to communicate these ideas of the body and time. Boucher’s painting is a celebration of the female nude. Rather than simply excoriating a squalid, old painting, Ishilla’s contemporary, feminist interpretation highlights that these values of beauty, imbued in the female nude, are not divine scripture sent from Venus but are the products of a human society dominated by men. The bodies dissipate into a fluid form, leaving behind only uncertain shapes of genitalia and precious pearls.