cooked raw

In addition to photographic, video and installation works over the years Marc Lafia has made a good many drawings and paintings. In these new watercolors, he presents various scenarios of pleasure, power and desire. There is no such thing as a universal body, as all bodies are cultural constructions and as such here Marc wants to explore how we live and exist as bodies and appetites, in relation to our affective sense, in relation to the inherent abstraction in line drawings.

Simultaneously whimsical and poignant, he depicts pleasure and distress at the limits of a kind of excess, as a human condition without remedy, as a kind of folly and burlesque. Starting with pencil line drawings he inks select lines with bamboo, colors with watercolors and then scans the work to print at almost life size. The intimacy of the works, now large, creates the effect of being pressed up close, maybe too close, to a lucid and guttural dream of scenes, mythic and imaginative, with an affect all too real. In turning to drawing Lafia wants to present an image that can escape the literalness of the photographic and to get inside the poetic dimension of an ongoing human condition.

Between 1964 and 1971 Claude Levi-Strauss published the four volume series,The Cooked and the Raw, focusing on the structure and 'essence' of 'savage' mythology. For Levi-Strauss, it was not simply empirical reality that influenced the researcher but the mind itself that structures what it perceives. Myth contains, at the deep level, a conflict between polarized values, hence cooked/raw, darkness/light, land/sea, man/woman, and the myth story, sets about to reconcile these supposed opposites. Every culture tries to control these categories by defining them as either "taboo" or "sacred". Try as we may to keep such distinctions, soon they leak and bleed into each other, crossing boundaries and cohabit. As such French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in 1966, wrote his essay, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, contesting Levi Strauss that structural oppositions, had in them the trace and play of each other and gave us difference and deconstruction. In these works of undecided meanings, without hierarchy or absolute opposition there is play and hence the title Cooked Raw.

The artist like the cook is a cultural agent who ensures that the natural become cooked and undergoes a process of socialization. Yet underlying this process of socialization, this cooked, is indeed something that remains raw. In our overly cooked global circuit we can not fail to see the raw everywhere. Beneath the sheen, the polish and veneer, the raw lies quietly in wait. And it is precisely the underside of the cooked, the other side of the cooked, that Lafia wants to map in these new works which are simultaneously, cooked and raw.