Anita de Soto
All of my work explores human frailty, our vulnerability. I like to play around with paradox, so I like my artworks to be beautiful, but they can sometimes be affronting and unpleasant at the same time.
Anita DeSoto's fascination with the myths, dreams and outright lies that people live and die by is evident in the titles of both her recent exhibitions; ‘Cross my Heart' at Milford Galleries, and ‘Pie in the Sky' at Oedipus Rex Gallery.
The Otago Polytechnic School of Art drawing lecturer's emotionally charged and finely detailed paintings are populated by a cast of religious martyrs, tortured lovers and souls in limbo who seem to exist in two worlds at once – one a mythical realm in which the laws of physics don't apply, and the other the world of fl esh, pain, pleasure, sex and death. "Disappointment with love" is one of the major themes of her recent works, DeSoto says. "All of my work explores human frailty, our vulnerability. I like to play around with paradox, so I like my artworks to be beautiful, but they can sometimes be affronting and unpleasant at the same time." The paintings Holy Smoke I and II delve into this confl ict, depicting a male and a female nude, respectively. Together they are archetypal lovers, and their idealized, muscular bodies seem poised between ecstasy and agony. The female fi gure clutches at a chest wound and the male's hand is punctured by the stem of a rose. In Holy Water, the relationship between the beautiful and the affronting is playfully presented in the form of an angelic cherub who urinates over the edge of his celestial pedestal.
De Soto draws a great deal of inspiration from the iconography of the past. "My technique is very much based on a renaissance way of painting," she says. "I'm a bit lonely in the modern world in that sense. There aren't many of us out there doing it – especially fi gurative painting. I like to draw on religion and on old myths, and this ties in with that, referencing the history of art where these myths are recorded."
It is perhaps another paradox of her work that with their focus on the fantastical and surreal, DeSoto's paintings also work to draw attention to issues, ideas and emotions that are very real indeed.