ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
From my series of collage works inspired by Marguerite Duras’ erotic novella The Lover (L’Amant) – a sparse, disjointed, dreamy, almost hallucinatory minimal tale of love and cruelty. Of longing, absence, primitive need, and dislocation. The novel speaks to the language of dreams, the language of recollections.
The title of the series, La Petite Mort (Little Death) – refers to the French expression meaning ”the brief loss or weakening of consciousness,” and is generally used as a euphemism for orgasm. Modern usage refers specifically to ”the sensation of post orgasm as likened to death.” More widely, it can refer to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm or to a short period of melancholy or transcendence as a result of the expenditure of the ”life force.”
For modern philosophers, la petite mort is about more than just the physical act of sexual climax, it’s also about psychological loss. Some philosophers have theorized that la petite mort is about the spiritual release that comes with orgasm. This spiritual release, they argue, makes you temporarily “lose” yourself. Some scientists have linked this feeling to the release of oxytocin in the brain after an orgasm. For a philosopher like Roland Barthes, it’s a feeling that we can find beyond the bedroom.
Barthes spoke of la petite mort as the chief objective of reading literature. He used the concept of la petite mort, which he called ”jouissance” (“bliss”), to describe how we should feel about reading certain books in his well-known work The Pleasure of the Text (1973). A book that inspires feelings of ”jouissance,” he theorized, will cause readers to momentarily lose themselves in the work. We’re all familiar with the expression of “losing yourself in a good book,” but how many of us know that this concept was originally theorized in relation to a euphemism for orgasm? These paintings – excerpts of text taken from Duras’ erotic novel and placed in a different context – playfully suggest a subtle connection between sex and death and great literature.
BIOGRAPHY
Cynthia Grow is a visual artist whose work explores the interstices between art and language. Influenced by her studies in literature, she works alternately between abstract paintings and text-based conceptual works on paper. She harnesses the same sources of inspiration for both – language and memory – and achieves an overall aesthetic signature marked by strong senses of mood, poetry, and atmosphere.
Cynthia studied painting at Accademia d’Arte in Florence, Italy and has completed projects at residencies throughout Italy and Spain, as well as seminars at New York Studio School, National Academy School of Fine Art, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In addition to studio training, she completed a program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Connoisseurship, & the Art Market at Christie’s Education New York and holds a Master’s degree with a concentration in Modern Arts & Literature.
Cynthia has exhibited works in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami as well as galleries and cultural centers in Europe including Florence, Venice, Rome, Madrid, and Barcelona. Her work has been featured in prizes, publications, and exhibitions across both continents. For the past decade, she has lived and worked between the U.S. and Catalunya. She recently relocated to her native Florida, working between Gainesville and when possible, extended periods in Barcelona.