Nicky Beer The Floating Girl In Teraoka's Wave Series paintings the cephalopods seduce young female divers, spread tentacles massing from corner to corner in erotic landscapes; despite the stark Ukiyo-e inkstrokes delineating these contours into parabolic clarity, the scenes of "loving cunnilingus" between beast and woman create a fantastic aesthetic confusion: you can barely differentiate the ocean waves from the indigo tattoos surging in breakers up her body, the tide of legs e路ngulfing her (you nearly miss the spread, fine-haired holothurian of her sex in all the visual noise) ...And how can such an encounter end? Does she succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw of her lover, a feast ravishing and ravished to be digested in the massive pouch of some lightless Marianas? Or does she survive, but spend moonless nights in her husband's bed longing for a confusion of limbs unencumbered by bone? Or perhaps there is no end to this, only an abiding Mobius strip, chiral and irreconcilable, a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood: desire's sought-after moment of dissolution when What surrenders entirely to How.
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FUGUE#34