Salon 94: Artists

$paired, mirrored, flayed, javelin-impaled, cable-delineated-pendentive-funnel-suspended, squid-like, priapic / labio-vulval, Janusian meta-portrait lozenges of the artist, screaming, and Matthew Barney, in two guises: determined combatant and recently-deceased, resigned stoic, with the first composite figure richly embossed, in a manner reminiscent of late-Renaissance Milanese parade armor, with a cornucopia of silhouetted motifs: Abrahamic ecclesiastical symbols, animals, decorative flourishes, and protuberant, warty, half-spheres; and the second devoid of embellishment, in book-split, medially-bifurcated onyx from Baja California: half an exuberantly-variegated, intensely-colored, fractal-patterned, striped-and-spotted white-yellow-red; half a comparatively-uniform semi-translucent, nacreous, pale yellow-white with differing surface treatments keyed to the corresponding swag-draped corporeal flay strata: a glistening mucosal sheen for the splayed entrails, either miniature horizontal flutes or a micro-stippled matte finish for the mid-level viscera, and either gnarled, ridged, sfumato-esque soft-focus ornamental relief or, again, diminutive horizontal flutes for the epidermis, with eyes and oral features gleaming, respectively, with a moist, lachrymal / salivary polish, with mannered, attenuated, crown-like cranium-top shatter-burst exit-wounds$

<small>Barry X Ball
<br>SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
<br>February 10 – May 13</small>

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