06 Jul THE NUDE BODY

The nude body is an essential part of the Occidental art, not only in the area of the sculpture and painting but also as a representation of the human being as the center of the universe and the measure of everything.

From the V century, the Greeks found in the nude body the way to abstract, to establish mathematical measures, formulate canons of proportions and beauty, even to humanize their religious feeling.

The discovery (or invention according to some Art historians) of the nude body as a language has influenced not only in the evolution of the art but also in all the aspects of our culture, establishing the fruitful tension of strip and dress that Nietzsche points out in the opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and to Freud, is in the origin of the guilt.

In the Fine Arts Schools, the study of the nude body is combined with the study of the garbs. For some authors, the movement of the shoulders, hips, arms of a nude body is already a type of clothing.

The religious Christian iconography, influenced by the strong Greco-Roman tradition is plenty of nude bodies more or less pagan. The nudity is associated with the asceticism, the purity and the state of perfect innocence, following the biblical image of Adam and Eve, and the fact of dressing to the fact of cover the shame of the sin and the blame. But the tension between nudity and clothes transcends the representation of the human body. There are nude landscapes, nude still lives, nude abstract art, whose asceticism is made manifest both in the sobriety of the themes and in the election of the technique and the materials employed to its elaboration; in opposition we have other more sophisticated languages which include the sensuality, the sexuality, the eroticism, the different forms of the ambiguous, etc. About these themes there is a lot of literature and no artist from the Venus of Willendorf, through already all the Greek art, the Renaissance and nowadays that has not included some nude body in their works, nor to elude the latent tension between strip and dress. It is a long tradition from which I do not escape, so it seems interesting to me collect and offer there my own work as a sample of I have said and possible contribution to this inexhaustible subject.