Funnel “Sex to Gender”
Since his famous erotic theory concerning Collioure’s bell tower, MA2F has pursued the exploration of the duality in every field and looked for different possible lectures. The sexual orientation of the world, as divided in masculine and feminine, is beyond this basic approach because of the cultural dimension included in the corpus of explicit or implicit rules which governs norms and social values
Further than the biological sex, here is questioned the sensed sex, that is to say the gender, considered as a fluctuating category, based on ephemera and claudication, flirting with inter-sexuality.
Duality, set as the essence of one’s being, the essence of the world itself, gives way to passages from one to another, repeatedly, a sort of reversed trans-gender, on the tiny string of identity. Funnels, erected as a reading grid of the world, are both hermaphrodite and androgynous in the manner that their sexuation depends on the way they are observed (inside / outside), on their position (up / down) and their use (a passage, but for what ?). Symbolically bearing concavity and convexity, emptiness and erection, a funnel is a passage in itself ; it might be a torture instrument when used to drown someone ; if used as a ridiculous hat, it symbolizes insanity ; in dialectics, (questionnaire), it forces consciousness.
Both forceps and uterus at the same time, it expels, receives and keeps nothing but the trace or print of what went through it. In this respect, it represents the beings who populate the world and whose ending constitutes unity, the symbolic projection of a biological failure and the internal, mental, imaginary possibility of its reparation.
MA2F ‘s funnels are multiform and polychromatic : they might be painted, carved, sculpted, built in Mediterranean traditional dry stone, covered with finish and drips, smooth or rough, they might also be the protagonists of portraits, or monumental works.
Through his funnels, we can guess the intimate background of the artist who was, as a boy, fascinated by the immemorial gesture from the winery world, by the swirl created in an emptying bottle, or the reversed maelstrom in the funnel opening on the mystery of wine. A vision deeply rooted in a soil both on the edge of sea and land. A boy inhabited by the necessary passage beyond appearances for which funnels are today both a mirror and path.
MC