Prolific French photographer Sacha Goldberger has put together a marvelous series of paired tableaux that serve as erotic meditations on différance, sex, loneliness, and conflict, and they also function as clever puzzles or fractured narrative that it’s up to the viewer to figure out or complete. The series is called Secret Eden, and it gets more NSFW as more information is revealed.

Every portrait actually consists of two photographs, which go together. In every case some of the subjects are in one of the photos and some are in the other one—both of which depict the same place from the same angle but at different times. When you take in a pair of the photographs, the mind is obliged to superimpose the figures literally “onto” each other, as the people in the pictures (often half-naked and/or supine) inevitably combine to create familiar images of coitus or fellatio.

In lay terms, you look at the two pictures, put ‘em together in your mind, and they’re fuckin’.

Such games do not define the limits of Goldberger’s art, however. On a purely technical level the pictures are masterfully done, requiring patience and precision in the areas of blocking, set design, makeup, and much more. Although the pictures in Secret Eden range in setting from the distant past to the distant future, the core of the images define or exploit a meticulously imagined midcentury modern environment that will cause you to remember the UN building in NYC, the architecture of Eero Saarinen, and the many evocative interiors of Mad Men.

Further, Goldberger runs with the twinned nature of his own project to come up with scenarios that play on the Romeo-and-Juliet-ish binaries that govern our lives—East/West, male/female, black/white, man/beast, and day/night. One of the dual portraits imagines the Cold War coupling of a female U.S. soldier and her male counterpart from the USSR. Another reimagines Planet of the Apes as a sex romp. Others have fun with our shared fairy tale heritage or the rarefied nobility of centuries past. The invariably indifferent or nonplussed expressions only serve to accentuate the essential loneliness captured by the idea.

Two years ago (almost to the day, actually) we looked at “Super Flemish,” another project of Goldberger’s that remagined the superheroes of our own era as 16th-century aristocrats.
 


French Garden
 


A Dog’s Life
 


Ape’s Patrol
 
More after the jump…

As science fiction meets history of art, time meets an inexhaustible desire for mythology which is within each of us.
—Sacha Goldberger

Viewing these photos by artist Sacha Goldberger on a smart phone simply won’t do them justice. You really need to zoom in on the images to admire the painstaking detail that Goldberger has put in to them.

The series is called “Super Flemish” and an exhibition for it was recently held at the School Gallery Paris. 

Sacha’s discovery of these characters, which goes back to childhood, gave birth to a desire to re-appropriate them, to take them back to a time forming the cornerstone of modern western art. Sacha wants to confront these icons of American culture with contemporary painters of the Flemish school. The collection demonstrates the use of 17 century techniques counterpointing light and shadow to illustrate nobility and fragility of the super powerful of all times. It also invites you to celebrate the heroes of your childhood. These characters have become icons to reveal their humanity: tired of having to save the world without respite, promised to a destiny of endless immortality, forever trapped in their character.

The superheroes often live their lives cloaked in anonymity. These portraits give them a chance to « fix » their narcissism denied. By the temporal disturbance they produce, these images allow us to discover, under the patina of time, an unexpected melancholy of those who are to be invincible.

I didn’t post all the images, as I want to encourage you to visit Goldberger’s website so you can view them all in hi-res.

 

 

 
More after the jump…