Abject Feasts and Eucharistic Lovers at MAMA Projects

Paula Querido, Estátua de Mármore (2024). Courtesy of MAMA Projects and Alexander Perrelli.

Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up.

The winged figure that fills the foreground of Paula Querido’s Estátua de Mármore possesses the unfaltering grace of Niké of Samothrace but the virility of Antonio Canova’s Cupid swooping down to revive Psyche. A reclining figure lingers at the fringes of legibility, flickering between phantom and flesh. Two deep blue shadows in the background merge, fuse, and collapse into each other. The composition reverses thresholds of the visible, the cobalt earth threatening to swallow up the central nude, countered by the calcified angel standing in a small pool of her own blood.

Pathways at MAMA Projects. Installation view. Courtesy of MAMA Projects and Alexander Perrelli.

There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.

Pathways at MAMA Projects utters in hisses and whispers the anticipatory temporality of Martin Heidegger’s idea of dasein, being-in-time, being-in-love, making no distinction between apprehension and existence. Scanning the inverted glances and speculative afterimages, my mind flits to Hélène Cixous’s “Love of the Wolf,” cited above, an account of the synapse between destruction and desire.

There is something strikingly textual about the work that fills the gallery despite its pointed lack of text. Pathways is acutely about the body but exudes the sense that the her to which the artists refer has left her body, or it has been left. The space enacts a reliquary for the disembodied voices that haunt the barely legible legacies of tangled hers across histories of image and text—Simone’s Zaza, Gerda’s Lili, Virginia’s Vita and Vita’s Virginia, Anna’s Rosa and Rosa’s horses. (Six tiny horses, in fact—five glass and one ceramic, the work of Masha Morgunova—flit across the wall closest to the gallery entrance.) [1]

Featuring the work of Alessandra Acierno, Laura Berger, Masha Morgunova, Nicki Cherry, Stephanie Lucchese, and Paula Querido, the exhibition loosely weaves a narrative around a protagonist, her. In place of a traditional exhibition text, a prose poem by Elaine M.L. Tam cuts a pathway, albeit a meandering one, through the work. Selves morph into other selves, reason dissolves into darkness, a memory passes through one body and into another. After all, the body, her body, is only on temporary loan.

Nicki Cherry, Maladaptive (2024). Courtesy of MAMA Projects and Alexander Perrelli.

The person we hate we “can’t swallow.”

Nicki Cherry’s Maladaptive elicits an intense awareness of the difference between thirst-quenching and hydrating. The classically-informed, headless nude speaks to the simultaneity of desire and repulsion, the feeling of wanting to crawl out of one’s own skin and into another. A stainless steel spigot punctures the mottled, sandstone-hued flesh between the shoulder blades, with the spine ending in a deep cavity waiting to be filled. The work evokes the extravagantly feminine nudes of another Ni(c)ki, Niki de Saint Phalle, the self-taught French-American artist known for her monumental sculptures and early advocacy of AIDS education. Maladaptive embodies the Satrean longing to inhabit a state of being characterized by pure consciousness, an attempt to flee the perpetual precipice of seeing the self because it is seen by the other.

Stephanie Lucchese, when it is too dark to see I watch anyhow (2024). Courtesy of MAMA Projects and Alexander Perrelli.

I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive … Sign my death with your teeth.

Stephanie Lucchese’s when it is too dark to see I watch anyhow is punctured by a near-devourment that dispossesses the image of its fetishistic potential. The tangle of limbs coheres in a single entity, being both the seducer and the seduced, the wolf and the lamb. Seen in the peripheral, the fork grasped in the kneeling figure’s hand above her lover’s chest morphs into a split second of fear flashed across the reclining figure’s absent face.

Tam articulates her ill-fated longing for “the lightest of impressions to leave an indelible mark, for hunger to feel see-through and need to feel … less like solipsism.” Pathways is a farewell of the flesh, a recourse to the ruins. It spells out the sleepless desire to feel no desire at all, a being-towards-death that nonetheless insists on an indelible ecstasy.

Paula Querido, A Capa (2024). Courtesy of MAMA Projects and Alexander Perrelli.

[1] Simone de Beauvoir & Élisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin; Gerda Wegener & Lili Elbe; Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West; Anna Elizabeth Klumpke & Rosa Bonheur.

Pathways is on view at MAMA Projects, New York, from November 21 to December 19, 2024.