Lilia LoCurto and William Outcault

Exquisite Bodies

Exquisite Bodies, to be presented by Lilia LoCurto and William Outcault in the Foundation's Espai 13 on 24 January, is perhaps one of the exhibitions in the "Anatomies of the Soul" cycle that shows most clearly the vulnerable nature of the human body and the awareness of a fragile body exposed to illness and disease.

Lilia LoCurto (Venezuela) and Wllliam Outcault (New Jersey) use state-of-the-art technology to materialise their concern with such contemporary issues as Aids and such eternal subjects as immortality. This exhibition contains two items: Self-Portrait and Bean Boys.

Self-Portrait was previously shown at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a reflection on an imaginary situation: a person suffering from Aids protected in a germ- and virus-free capsule. After evidence that this utopia was far from reality,
LoCurto / Outcault conceived this piece consisting of a stack of four TV screens inside a huge bubble, on which, like exquisite corpses, various pieces of the human body are reproduced with the faces of the viewers in the Espai 13. The monstrous association made by chance by the surrealists is converted here into a direct dialogue with the viewers, whose faces appear on the screen protected by a network of veins and arteries through which their own blood flows, in a space in which they hear their own heartbeats. Complementing this crude and realist vision of Aids, LoCurto/Outcault will be showing Bean Boys, a threatening, frightening image of the inhabitants of an imaginary world with no arms or legs. They are the representation of what survival could mean.