The Origin of the World

In the mid-1800s, painter Gustave Courbet created a painting named "The Origin of the World." It was the first time in the history of art that a painter portrayed the image of a vagina in a realistic way, without any kind of symbolism. It was a scandal at the time. My piece takes inspiration from Courbet and reflects the need to strip the erotic feeling from the overexposure of explicit content in the contemporary age.

The realist French painter Gustave Courbet painted "The Origin of the World" for an Arab diplomat in the mid-1800s. The collector used to preserve the painting in the bathroom, behind a green tent, exposing it only to selected viewers. After him, in the mid-1900s, the scandalous painting was acquired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and he too used to preserve the painting in a secret room, showing it only to selected people, due to the exposure of the female body without any kind of symbolism.

I have painted this artwork on paper, taking inspiration from the famous painting by Courbet, as a reflection on the overexposure of explicit content in the contemporary age, and as a way to preserve the erotic energy, as the collectors of "The Origin of the World" used to do with Courbet's painting.

Philosophically, it's a concept explored by the contemporary Italian philosopher Mario Perniola in his book "The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World," published by Continuum in 2004, in which he explains how the erotic feeling has changed in the postmodern era, with the fruition of images.