Natuka Honrubia

Natuka Honrubia, Mutations of desire
Lourdes Santamaría Blasco

One of the concepts beating intensely at the heart of the works of Natuka Honrubia is the Freudian 'sinister': a crossroads between opposites; when 'something' that was always familiar in the physical/psychic world suddenly turns strange through a process of its own repression, and what should have remained hidden becomes manifest in a manner that is unfortunate, disturbing and anxious. 'The sinister' is often coupled with 'the abject' and 'the formless', concepts from the work of Georges Bataille which to a greater or lesser degree (like a depth charge or a nightmare that terrifies us without yet being quite able to recall it), in a manner sometimes subtle, sometimes cruel, lie deep in the sculptures and drawing-collages of Natuka Honrubia. Art itself moves between such proscribed concepts-territories as its natural domain. Not in vain did Francis Bacon declare: What type of artist, of poet would I be, if I did not dare to enter into prohibited places, those which do not even have a name?

José Miguel G. Cortés suggests, in reference to the concept of 'formlessness' that it is not merely something opposite to 'form', but an element in and of itself, a possibility which complements and at the same time erodes, degenerates or corrupts from within its own interior; something that participates and yet is distinct. The sculptures and drawings of Natuka Honrubia participate fully in this condition; in them, bodily limits are overflowed, categories obliterated and genres confused.

In works such as Blooming Feast we see a (re)celebration of The Artemis of Ephesus, that masculinized virgin Goddess of drunken fertility, with her multiple breasts and/or bull's testicles, anus and phalluses displayed as clusters of grapes, scattered like a formless offering of flesh, finally quartered on the very table to be offered up for the enjoyment of refined palates - like those of Simone, the perverse heroin of 'The Story of the Eye', castrator and devourer of the Minotaur's testicles.

From the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, through Manet's Dejeneur sur l´herbe with the flesh of its demi-mondaines exposed to the pleasures of the voyeur, to the Cannibal Feast of Méret Oppenheim, where the artist exhibits herself nude and devoured for the delight of anthropophagic surrealists, the flesh has always been a metaphor and symbol of obsessive and insatiable desire, as in Salvador Dalí who, in the midst of absolute gastronomic ecstasy cried out: Beauty shall be edible, or it shall not be. Louise Bourgeois and, above all, Hans Bellmer have never ceased to explore the anatomy of desire which is enclosed within the flesh, although for that (or to be more precise because of that) they have had to disintegrate and transgress the known limits of the body, taking it to hyperbolic monstrosity.

So too Natuka Honrubia, who in her works Bumblebee and Glow creates mutant hybrids, falsely anarchic, such as hermaphroditic snails with multiple protuberances and orifices for self-pleasuring. In Bees to the Flowers we see a stylized table on which are arranged clusters of breast-testicles with hyperreal nipples, like globes filled with androgynous flesh on the very point of explosion. All this flesh, of the consistency of chewing gum (Chewing Gum), elastic, chewed up and spat out, multiplies the effects of obscenity and seduction, the innocent infancy of the perverse polymorph. This is the deliquescence of the “New Formless Flesh”, reminiscent of Cronenberg and Lynch, two masters of disturbance and morphological excess.

In the works of Natuka Honrubia we see a disquieting manifestation of the 'sinister' and 'formlessness'. Not only does the irruption of the double or the hidden 'something' disturb: the abject is subversive, impure and unproductive, like the transgressive acts of sexual taboos. It is identified too with the cadaver or the corrupted, with those elements expelled and segregated by the body which might endanger the integrity of the human being and reveal its miserable and vulnerable condition. The person is seen threatened by physical or psychic mutations which conjugate irreconcilable opposites, hybrid against nature, macabre seductions, as in the sculpture Foxy Lady: a Spider-Medusa (symbolist nightmare dreamed by Odilon Redon) or perhaps the silken gaze of an octopus with tentacles of steel; its mouth-anus-vulva reveals the secret flesh, the surprising pink (shocking pink) of the Venus cocktrap.

The creations of Natuka Honrubia exemplify the plastic transformation of the literary figure of the oxymoron (an impossibility; a miracle-mutation-aberration, an inversion of the laws of nature of uncertain meaning, harmonizing opposed concepts and/or contradictions in a single expression). And once again the fecund Artemis materializes in My Rabbit, a hare-human hybrid attempting to support breasts spilling like intestines, nipples encrusted with eyes-eggs that accentuate the sensation of being scrutinized. In Smiling Señorita we see a dog with its stupid yet malevolent smile (like the Joker in Batman); it is an animal considered obscene for its accumulation of sexual connotations, with its skin obscenely blushing and nude, covered with useless nipples like wounds or suppurating bumps, with a young girl's vagina and ambiguous tail. In Riding Master, a master-slave sings, as per Iggy Pop&The Stooges: Now I wanna de your dog… to feel the softness of black silk on my skin, to feel the hardness of my master trough the leather leash, coarse and jagged.

With her sculpture-prosthesis-mutations, Natuka Honrubia arrives at a curious synthesis, as if she were a disciple of Dr. Frankenstein, having graduated from specialist studies with Dr. Moreau on The Island of Lost Souls, and not forgetting her Masters in the perfection of haute-couture mutation, under the tutelage of Galliano, McQueen and Blahnik (of course) in London. And so, when cruelty rubs up against stylistic perfection, works-devices of flesh metamorphosed into sinisterly everyday objects are produced, such as the juicer-nipple of Swim Aflamed. What delicious juice might such an artifact produce? Or Early Breakfast, a lip-juicer-squeezer with tongue-spoon and egg-nipples. The apparent fragility of alien-eggs hides the firmness of unquiet tongues, willing to lick the spoon-finger of Swaddeling Core. In Unisex, the perverse polymorph believes it is adult, but cannot leave behind the longed-for toys of childhood, converted into inflatable prostheses with which it recreates the moment of the shower-bath which, rather than merely washing, provides an intimate and lascivious exploration of the body.

In Mighty Girl and Sugar Tongs, our favourite sculptor-surgeon creates surgical instruments worthy of the gynecological surgeon twins of 'Dead Ringers' (Cronenberg), devices created beyond professional limits in order to explore the trifurcate wombs of mutant women. Their erogenous instruments demonstrate the aerodynamic perfection of the body and its assemblage, every curve fitting perfectly with its opposite. The tongue-phallus-nutcracker is designed for purposes only the Marquis de Sade could conceive. In the same way, the lubricated and suggestive box of Organics guards its multiethnic finger-dildos. In the film 'Belle du Jour', that exquisite fetishist Buñuel draws our attention to a box carried by an oriental client, whose obscene contents (contents we never see, remaining always out of scene) are rejected apprehensively by the belles of the bordello. Only Deneuve, fellatoma and espermatrix as she is called by Michel Piccoli's character, dares to take up and, we imagine, use the ignoble device. Perhaps Natuka knew how to imagine and construct that obscure and secret fetish?

Translated by Luke Stegemann