Languor: The Nude : A survey Exhibition of different approaches to capturing the Nude subject(s) in Art.

Languor: The Nude

Naked bodies, ours and others, fascinate us. Speaking the words through our lips: Longing, longer, linger, languid, languish, languor, and words, sensually, feel the skin pressing against skin. Enthusiasm and enervation, ravishment and reflectiveness, eloquence and speechlessness, savouring and sadness.

Ellis Hanson, in his essay The Languorous Critic, sees in literary criticism a languorous indulgence of hesitation, a slowness, a slight lingering moment before certainty hardens in. Languor can make thought itself erotic, a mood akin to an “Art of Love.”

The nude subject, perhaps more than any other genre, is caught in a double bind: susceptible to the risk of being “naïve, delusional, narcissistic, fatuous, or effete,” or, on the other extreme, to simply fail to recognise any sentimentality in its subject at all. What Hanson calls the “bittersweetness of erotic fatigue” might, if we leap, be the very condition of looking at bodies, painted, sculpted, or photographed: to want them, to resist them, to savour them, to languish before.

Drawing on the small chapter devoted to it in Barthes’ Discourse of Love, we find a semiotics of delay, the lover who stretches out the moment of longing, who savours distance as much as contact, who lives in-between the intervals of desire. The nude, too, inhabits such an interval. It is never simply a body exposed, but a body suspended, between touch and distance, artifice and intimacy, projection and withdrawal.

This exhibition brings together different engagements with the nude, each revealing a different face of Languor. These are grouped under Hanson’s beautiful, contradictory prose: Longing, longer, linger, languid, languish, languor; enthusiasm and enervation, ravishment and reflectiveness, eloquence and speechlessness, savouring and sadness. These words name not only moods, but methodological approaches, each term tracing a mode of looking, a register of engagement, a rhythm of thought.