Darkside 19
Endorphine : The Art of Darkness
Smitty explores the ‘ unsettling ’ work of Laurent Benaim and the new book , ‘ Endorphine ’...
“ The horror ! The horror !” ― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness
I
must confess . There is something very unsettling about the art of Laurent Benaim . It leaves me with a very uneasy feeling , not unlike the time when I cleaned out my creepy old uncle ’ s house . It was just after his sudden death . There , among the cobwebs underneath his dirty misshapen bed , I discovered a shoebox . I pulled it out and opened it only to find packed with filthy homemade black and white photos which he had squirreled away in his prime .
It was an OMG kind of moment . He must have had at least one or more photos of every possible kind of kink , acted out with any number of people , any number of sex toys , and mostly all stark naked , somehow interlocked in a host of sexual positions that would have made the author of the Kama Sutra blush . The horror ! The horror of it all ! I threw that shoebox in the trash , of course , tried to forget it , never said another thing .
Laurent Benaim ’ s new book Endorphine creates that same unsettling feeling . It ’ s bold and blunt , even downright pornographic . But that ’ s only part of the same unsettling feeling . Each photo is so well composed , the blacks , the whites , the carefully modulated shades of gray , even the flat , even lighting is so well arranged . His style alludes to something akin to an artist ’ s charcoal figure studies , a postmodern sketchbook of sorts , but yet not at all unlike Hieronymus Bosch ’ s famed fivehundred-year-old triptych , The Garden of Earthly Delights . Art ? Or porn ? This is the unsettling part of his clever craft . He leaves it all for the viewer to decide .
Endorphine reminds me of a sentence Joseph Conrad once wrote . “ The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it , all the past as well as the future .” Endorphine , therefore , becomes something more than an old shoebox full of random porn . It is instead an intentionally created journey into the shadowed side of the human psyche . Author Joseph Conrad once likened the very same journey in his seminal novella , The Heart of Darkness . “ Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma . There it is before you , smiling , frowning , inviting , grand , mean , insipid , or savage , and always mute with an air of whispering , ‘ Come and find out ’.” “ Find out ” is exactly what we do .
Laurent writes , “ I have always been fascinated by sexuality , the diversity of our practices , the never ending will of those who try to make their fantasies come true ; fascinated by this incredibly intense moment , orgasm , when all barriers , rules , everyday wisdom , seem to collapse to let intimacy be seen : the true nature of human beings unveiled .” Laurent also photographs more than
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