BODYPART, b&w
Martin Margiela
Here again, Martin Margiela is inspired by the technique of classical charcoal drawing, which he applies to a banal object usually used for viewing documents and moving images.
The artist depicts a man’s body as it might be seen on a beach or in the many places where people expose themselves to the sun. However, the orientation of the image has been changed, suddenly giving it an erotic dimension. The drawing also bears the traces of the material coming off the canvas—Margiela uses this accident, and amplifies it—togive life to the work and free it from the obsession of conservation by subjecting it to a process of soiling and decay. A perfectly symmetrical mirror drawing, it uses the classical figure of the double, an image representative of the duality of being. This ubiquitous theme in literature and the arts evokes otherness, identity, the self and its projection, and the irreducible distance that separates us from our image.