Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at High Art

Artist: Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

Exhibition title: Autofelatio

Venue: High Art, Paris, France

Date: December 15, 2018 – January 26, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and High Art, Paris

Autofelatio: A bastardly paradoxical concept, a term of both perfect harmony and inevitable collapse. Denoting wasted progress or the perfect selfie, a penultimate state of being.

Stripped to the core, an engine offers an open vision of its intestines; an intricate composition of tubes and mechanical components morphing into vegetal and ornamental patterns. A soft ocean like tongue invites participation into the depth of cyborgian bowels abiding in self-exploration and onanism. Hands palpating, fingers and protuberances insinuating – a feeling of constriction and claustrophobia emanate.

The symbolically charged shapes of octagon and circle become dramatized peepholes through which autonomous machines stare back, in an expression of paralyzed sexual energy and/or the promise of infinite mobility as realized through the release of political agency.

Filled with body enhancing instruments, the gym is a stage for self-development and pose, an idealized arena to seek a rational and formalized vehicle. Overtly androgynous athletes pursue an inaccessible growth, lingering in narcissism and self-contemplation is the only sustainable action.

Solidified in hand stitched embroideries, bodies bursts from their figurative limitations, abandoning themselves to the irresistible merge with machine. A haptic appetite in a conflicted compulsion to take control while indulging in automation. Polished interiors of empty electrical cars become deserted landscapes; smooth surfaces which only vaguely remember the shapes of the individuals that once inhabited them. Beautiful creatures self-driving toward the impending failure of the progress they perpetually stand for.

– Anna Frera