For “Recombines,” his first solo show in Italy, German-born, LA-based artist Sterling Ruby presents photographs and sculptures that investigate the human body, its matter, and its unconscious desires. The series “Physicalism the Recombine” includes six large black-and-white photographic collages portraying bodybuilders, both male and female, whose robust figures occupy almost the entirety of each image. Faces—probably graced with winning smiles—are never shown; they’re either cropped out of the shot or hidden by black-and-white images of burning candles. Almost indistinguishable in their athletic poses, these men and women, despite their corporeal energy and muscular tension, seem more like lifeless statues of ancient deities. The presence of the candles adds something eerie to the photographs, suggesting both the Enlightenment and a touch of cheesy eroticism.
Surrounded by these frozen heroes, two black sculptures rise as from low pedestals like totemic idols. Both dubbed “Monument Stalagmite,” they contaminate the notion of the monument by overturning it: Ruby cast the two large glazed urethane masses by dripping the synthetic material from above and then installing the resulting volume upside down. Resonating with Lucio Fontana’s black formless ceramic sculptures, these inverted monuments, like the photographs that surround them, evoke power through control and violence through domination. Ruby’s imagery is uncanny but, at the same time, sensual and almost erotic. Desire and violence permeate the show, but as soon as one of these feelings prevails, it is immediately superseded by the other.
