
RARE
“Rare is an erotic criss-cross of light and shadows that traces a defiant act of creative play between a group of subversive underground queer artists in a low lit, gritty backstage room of a New York City night club. An intimate photographic sketch, bites of desire, gender-bending performance and sensuality emerge from the atmospheric realm of spontaneous creation.” - NMR






EROS VEILED BY ARIADNE
NAZITA MATRES REZAI is an interdisciplinary artist whose last creation RARE, in the cycle of images on paper, constructs a magic account weaving cinema and painting in her sublime photographs.
NAZITA identifies herself with the Dionysian awakening of the mythical Ariadne, her reign of Bacchus defined by a brilliant staging that partially inherits from Cubism and from the Soviet allegorical mise en scene the multiplicity of points of view and angles leading to the magic concealment of Eros, veiling images and faces that connect with the paintings of Francis Bacon to create a symbolic space linked to Hitchcock and the bath scene of Susan in his movie Psychosis.
Links, gestures, revolve like strokes of paint that set the labyrinth of mirrors in motion, contoured and closed scenes that incite and alter the observation; the link-thread of Ariadne, in the absence of color, enhances the prominence of the magical narrative light that links mysticism and eroticism, conciliating East and West.
Darkness and illuminated contrasts empower the realm of the enigmatic Eros, Desire emanates from defiant fragments and diptychs concatenated and juxtaposed in a permanent dialectic, the line of the unstable horizon breaking; amid invisible collages homage is paid to the New French Wave and Dogma, evidencing an itinerary of broken mirrors that align in front of the perennial Dressing Table sublimed by the eternal mirrors of NAZITA.
EDUARDO BLAZQUEZ MATEOS
Lecturer at Alicia Alonso Superior Institute of Dance
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
QUEER
RARE traces a single night in the back room of a New York City nightclub. It is 2003 and a group of queer artists have come together in a bout of unplanned creativity.
In this space for resistance and communion, Nazita evokes the New York hedonism of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Antoine D’Agata, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley, all by way of Claude Cahun’s surrealist monochrome androgyny.
However, if Clark and Goldin offer us sombre, bittersweet warnings about the dangers of excess, whilst Snow and McGinley lean into its loucheness with wild abandon, RARE offers us a third way. What’s more, while Clark, Goldin, Snow et alia. variously deplore or delight in the bodily afflictions of often self-destructive hedonism (track marks, semen, AIDS, emaciation), in RARE it is gender play and the pleasure contained therein that is inscribed on the body: the binder, the jock strap, the moustache.
The spontaneous, intimate energy is caught in a crossfire of lights, of camera flashes, of glances across the room. Charged with erotic experimentation, the subjects are looking at each other perhaps more than the camera is looking at them. These flickers of desire, of seeing and being seen, show us an electric, generative nightlife beyond the confines of gender.
SIAN CREELY
Writer, translator, curator