Glass reviews the NYC-based Colombian photographer’s latest show – The Men of Flamenco
New York City’s upper east side Throckmorton Fine Art is exhibiting, for the fourth time, the images of NYC-based Colombian photographer Ruven Afanador. In a follow-up to his 2009 photographic compilation Mil Besos, visually chronicling the styled livelihood of female flamenco artists, Afanador has released Ángel Gitano – The Men of Flamenco (both books through Rizzoli). The latter, the more recent of the publications, explores the men of the characteristic Spanish dance – though not necessarily the masculine.
It’s sensual and homoerotic, playful and facetious, lurid and hyperbolic; though the curated snippet of Afanador’s oeuvre is flamboyant, it is nonetheless deliberately insightful. Its insight lies greatly in the perforation of gender boundaries customary to flamenco. Afanador’s “ángeles gitanos” – gypsy angels – are removed from their ballroom, their street-side, their any-traditional spatial setting, situated within a stylised desert setting and photographed brilliantly.
The profundity of Afanador’s photography often comes in the forms – or at the expense – of gendered conventionality, which is a subject breached, penetrated, and toyed with in this work. Near-nude men, phallic and Adonis-like, draped in their own sinuous waves of hair, or in long skirts, or hugged tight in form fitting, highly feminine garb. Alternatively, however, Afanador depicts men photographed in the throes of excessive, brute, caricatured masculinity, though the stylisation of it all can’t help but (in a conscious act of self-reference) circuitously harken tones of emasculation.
For example, even in a double-breasted suit and a towering Elvis-like bouffant, the stand-out portrait (though arguably each piece in the exhibit is stand-out in its own powerful right) of a wrinkle-laden, dapper elderly man projects strong feminine undertones – an overwhelming, polka-dotted boutonnière wears loud and impressive on his lapel, and, despite the sincere hetero-masculinity registered on his furrowed brow, the sitter is made susceptible to Afanador’s characteristic, photographic flamboyance
The portrait is powerful; the other portraits in the exhibit, in the book, for that matter (of which there are many more) are powerful. They are a collection of explorative, beautifully sensuous and strikingly investigative artworks. Sometimes beautifully desperate, at other times grimly assured, the collection of subjects – pictured choreographed and in alignment, as well as individually and more formally portrait-style – and Afanador have produced a specific, reflective, and poignantly curated insight into the world, the dance, the characters, the bodies, the je ne sais quoi of the genre flamenco and the men who play in, identify with, and simply dance it.
The Ruven Afanador exhibit will be at Throckmorton Fine Art at 145 East 57th Street, 3rd Floor, through February 28th. Afanador’s book, with a foreword by Diane Keaton, is now available.
Images via Throckmorton Fine Art, NYC, unless otherwise noted