Monica Majolie

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Monica Majolie
Artist’s website

Monica Majolie
Monica Majoli’s figurative paintings from the early 1990s to the present have depicted scenes of sexual fetishism— painstakingly actuated self-portraits with dildos or claustrophobically populated representations of S&M encounters between men. But she focuses less on the transcription of physical experience than on the suggestion of its most obdurate, if ineffable, psychological aspects and ramifications…

Monica Majolie
“One of the most important aspects of the work is that it is nonfictional. I only paint actual experiences, not fantasies. Within that I elaborate and alter things in the environment, but the activities and the rooms and objects in the interiors are “factual”. So in this way I view the paintings as documentary, as a way for me to memorialize events and relationships. The male sex scenes began when a close friend of mine started to go to underground piss parties and became increasingly involved with S/M sex. I had always been fascinated by his anonymous encounters with men. I envied the nonverbal quality and the absolute sexual abandon of his experiences…”

Monica Majolie
“For the past thirteen years my work has engaged issues of identity, intimacy and mortality. While predominantly sexually explicit, the primary focus of my work has consistently been on the psychological aspects of physical experience. The underlying content addresses the quest for emotional closeness and connection…”