To open an art mag is to see so much art. Our world has become more and more visual in the last 20 years: MTV, Industrial Light and Magic, flashy product design... So little actually can be called arresting. Flipping through magazines, Anthony Goicoleas work actually caught my attention in the riot of color that is our modern world. Its themes are strangely diffuse but all very relevant: Our growing interest in male adolescent sexuality and aggression, our nervous anticipation of human cloning, our need to find the last taboo standing. Goicoleas work is photomontage in which the 20something artist dresses and poses in such a way as to seem 13-15 years old. Usually, his photographs contain multiple images of himself as an early adolescent interacting with each other to produce the effect of a gaggle of boys doing boyish things. These might be anything: bullying, bare-knuckles fighting, masturbation, receiving Holy Communion, playing a prank, engaging in sport. The photos are highly stylized, slick and beautiful. They appear a bit like movie stills of a film never made. It adds to their mystique that we are forced to fill in narrative around them. It is interesting the artist chooses to focus on early male adolescence, a time of isolation and transgression. The photos then are cool and distant while hinting at a roil of desire. With his interchangable and narcissistic boy-clones/septuplets, Goicolea makes a statement about the closed world of the pubertal boy. His secret wants, his bewildering changes are kept to himself. The viewer looks on voyeuristically, never to truly enter the sexually febrile, wildly imaginative, wolfishly violent mind of our subject and his Doppelgangers.
off-the-hook beautiful. dark, satyrical, amazing and original storytelling - painstaking composition,staging. an eye for stark, whimsical truth. highly recommended...
