Illuminated Metropolis Gallery is pleased to present Meating Ryan by Cecilia Jurado curated by Jano Cortijo. Jurado has created a subtly evocative and potently erotic depiction of a person she has become well acquainted with in recent years for this solo exhibition. By virtue of daily routine and spousal cohabitation, the artist, whose previous work was an acute analysis on the mass media portrayal of beauty, has, naturally, understandably, shifted her gaze to a subject she now knows in almost microscopic detail.

“Meating Ryan” transmogrifies the notion of getting acquainted with someone into a sublime spectacle of fetishism and objectification not foreign to more romantic sentiments. By presenting the most carnal details of her husband’s body, Jurado has constructed a corporeal landscape loaded with feelings that run a long and complex gamut, from mere sexual ogling to elated spousal rapport, from the intense fixation on an overlooked flaw during a heated argument to the complete abstraction of a particular area for purely aesthetic reasons.

Like a sweet and perverse cook, Jurado has sectioned the protein of her most personal, ongoing and ever changing recipe, to better handle a meat that can never be precisely seasoned and does not require a definite cooking time. The familiarity she now has with this body has taken her from an initially cautious and required distance to the stage where she can now consume the flesh of her beloved in an almost literal way. Meeting Ryan was only the prelude to a slow and long sensory experience that Cecilia is tangibly acknowledging with a vibrant tableaux that combines the visceral aplomb of a butcher shop with the revering splendor of a religious mural.