Izuky and nude photography in Cuba

In the beginning was the body. Always a body. Or the bodies. The perception of the other, of others. And, of course, the perception of oneself in the other.

It is already known: as far as the history of photography is concerned, the naked body (or undressed, to allude to an anthropological distinction highlighted by Lucian Freud in his painting) inevitably goes through the quarrel against / from / around of the canon. This, more or less Greco-Latin, more or less reverent of realism and truthfulness, in turn contains an ingredient: that of morality.

However, the issue of morality is constantly analogized (and we see it on social media every day) in the act of obeying or not obeying a set of rules. In the dynamic of monitoring and punishing, as Michel Foucault would say.

All of this has to do, of course, with something that Giorgio Agamben explains: that nudity and nakedness are inseparable from a very strong theological mark. That is to say: what is crucial is not the fact of nudity itself, but the awareness of it. Agamben reminds us how it is stated that, before Original Sin and the Fall, nakedness did not exist as such.

Since the invention of photography, and long before in painting, nudity that shows “erogenous zones” (to use a phrase that has always seemed prudish and silly to me) is not the same as nudity that does not show them. Neither male nudity nor female nudity, with “puden parts” (another silly and frightening phrase) or without them.

Having said this, and flying over the threshold of common places, when one encounters Izuky Pérez's nudes, certain questions arise. How much power does the canon have, where does it reside, what does it consist of?

The first thing to take into account is that Izuky does not disbelieve in the vigorous seduction of the canon, nor in those powers that the canon puts into operation to represent (or try to represent) a type of beauty that, no matter how besieged, goes beyond fashion either ages or dissipates into the obvious.

The canon is still alive, it is a truth of art in general (and of nudes in particular) and its dialogue with the dilemma of representation becomes, naturally, a duel where there are thrusts everywhere.

As if we were saying: without weapons, you cannot come to terms with canonical beauty. On the other hand, that dilemma (that of representation) continues to be a basic axis, a main beam. And to represent the beauty of the body, immersion in nudity is practically inevitable.

In Izuky's photographs, the reinforcement of the canon occurs when we realize that there the body becomes a landscape and, at the same time, an atmosphere. In his unconscious dialogue with ancient (and modern) conceptions such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian, we would almost say that this ostensible perfectionism in his images has to do, essentially, with the balance of light, post-classical beauty, and the movement through which the body exhibits its performance as a “beautiful body.” Even so, it must be said that there is a very indirect Dionysian gesture: the act of inscribing that body in an area that separates it from common life.

His nudes create their own aura (atmosphere of momentary isolation) by becoming landscapes. And, while they are themselves (with their lights, their shadows and their lines), they constantly aim towards the creation of an exclusive space.

Perhaps for this reason, Izuky's nudes seem, observed from a certain perspective, to be hyperrealistic paintings and not photographs in themselves. This is something to take into account because it would be, in that case, a complicated return to the illusion of reality, but in the body. Purification with respect to the environment is an act that, here, inoculates an aerial condition, so to speak, to the bodies.

In the hyper-awareness of the real and the context, one can suppose that, being bodies of individual subjects, the context could be something to which one turns one's back for a moment. In this way, we would be able to think of a bodily identity of the naked individual, temporarily detached from History (why not?) to enter, also temporarily, into a place of scrutiny, contemplation and gaze, where he survives only for the canon and its reaffirmation. It would seem that there is an alliance of perception with self-perception.

“I am not convinced that intimacy is necessarily equivalent to fidelity to reality,” says photographer Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, and thus questions, with his work and from certain theoretical assumptions, the possible harmonization between the model and the picture. He introduces a dose of fiction that fights hard against a dose of witnessing.

I think that Izuky's work with nudes follows a similar path: looking for a narrative whose starting point is what the model contributes (a self-absorbed model, I clarify: self-perception is meditative and entails that), beyond its forms. , going through his personal affirmation, his identity, his vitality, until he gets rid of all that and understands himself not with the possible interpretations of the photo (to which, ultimately, the model is more or less alien), but more well with the only thing that is truly incontestable: the volumes and the light.

To the “dreamy” quality (that's a way of saying it) of the skin, something is added that is revealed to be symptomatic: photographing the naked body becomes an accumulation of experiences about the meaning of the naked body. It seems simple. But, strictly speaking, the body that is remembered is no longer the model or models but the images that the model proposes. It is a mental body.

In many of Izuky's nudes, leaving out the background is like saying that the background “gets in the way” or is not necessary. However, this highlights only one point: the body detained in the photo can acquire a transhistorical dimension, while making the moment a lucid variation of the “eternal.”

Equidistant, with the intention of distancing itself from both sexualization and morbidity, Izuky embraces the drama of sensuality, which in its case can be propositional, insinuating, and which is in the middle of an inception, since many times an image functions as the prelude to something that is going to happen. Something clearly sexual in nature. Something that preludes or settles into a strong caress. Something that wants to hide from us but that also doesn't want to hide that announcement, that intention. 

Thresholds, simulation, hiding, sexual pleasure.

Another thing that Izuky wants to show us is the harmony of movement as a construction of the mind, from that eye used by the mind that observes and fictionalizes nudity. The body within the social landscape can be very inharmonious and expresses, in essence, a destiny that often fails to separate itself from the tragic.

But here that tragedy is absent and the representation becomes a presentation (this is important because it indicates that something is constructed) of a type of reverence before the most widespread canon of nudity: Apollonian fervor + affirmation of a “happy” beauty.

Luckily, we are not facing a show-off beauty, but rather a revisiting of the canon from the perspective of the placidity of seduction, or something similar to seduction, whether direct or indirect. It is not by chance that in Izuky's probable genealogy there are some traces of photographers such as Jeanloup Sieff, Marc Lagrange or Bettina Rheims, and, especially, Waclaw Wantuch.

The four are masters of nudity, of capturing that multitude of anomalous links between the free and primal body and the various landscapes where it imposes its presence, by inscribing itself through a preaching that invites us to think, a presumption that instigates and stimulates to the observer, to the public.

Another question: the spirituality of the anatomical, how a certain anatomism (I will say it that way) of framing and lighting metamorphoses into an explosion of sobriety, through states of mind such as calm, dreaming, inner peace or desire. States that announce a narrative that is not seen, but is felt.

Among several visible references in Izuky's nudes, capable of installing their brief mysteries (winks) and that are like metaphors, I particularly appreciate one where there is a crystal ball on a pubis that seems to withstand the coldness of the glass. Or a very dense and well-cut vertical Mount of Venus, around which there is an artificial sweat, like energetic dew. Or the labia majora of a vulva that can be seen from behind, in an underwater environment, or that pretends to be so. Or a symbolic crucifixion in Loma de la Cruz, a significant enclave of Izuky's hometown: Holguín. Or the contrast between machinism and naked skin, which is a topic of fragility and humanization. Or the cautious, but determined, proximity of male lips with respect to other lips: those of a vulva. Or the graphic, expeditious and incontrovertible, of cunnilingus, but from an occlusive perspective, where only the gestures (held hands, buttocks, a leaning back) of a very strong sexual tension are noticeable.

About this last image I will say something in classic Cuban: Izuky reproduces in it the most rhizomatic, covert and, yet, tenacious bun blowjob that I have been able to see in Cuban photography.

Thinking about his nudes and seeing them today, I would put an emphasis on the fact that there are many ways to absorb a photographic nude. Starting with the circumstance that the gaze that welcomes it is formed and deformed by a mobile crowd of cultural and vital references.

This swarm of references forms a very branching strain, and then looking-seeing becomes a virtually sliding and labyrinthine act. An act that nourishes us because it teaches us about the body and the infinity of its richness.