The nineteenth-century birth of Freikörperkultur (FKK) exemplified the era’s broader ‘life-reforming’ sentiments, reacting with discontent to rapid industrialization and urbanization. Eschewing modernity’s oppressive embodiment, the movement valorised nudity as a return to health and perennial flourishing. Today, their naturist successors pursue the value of communal nudity ‘in a natural environment and in natural conditions’.1 According to the international federation, ‘complete nudity is the most suitable clothing for getting back to nature.’2 But the condition to which these nudists appeal is, we observe, a cultural artefact—rooted in enlightenment conceptions of a human state before or without political association.3 For certain philosophers, descriptions of humankind existing in this ‘state of nature’ would underpin visions of the justly governed social body.
For partisans of modern nudity it was enough to unrobe. Today, Western European naturism is safely pursued in leisure time, as a holiday in unreality—on weekends or vacation. Once au naturel the nudist’s freedom purportedly begins, and a prelapsarian modus is affirmed within the allotted minutes. Such dreams of time unclothed by modern cares are naked fantasy. In some respects, the Freiheit of Körperkultur was always analogous to the wildness of the animals in captivity: let us note the contemporaneous development of FKK and Carl Hagenbeck’s zoological attractions.4 Was it also not in such zoos that naked colonial subjects were displayed, against their will, to a public hungry for more noble savagery than their own? Time off from clothing does not liberate by necessity.
As things stand, the concept of nudity as the body’s natural state—i.e., without adornment—suffers from a blind spot. It is one that issues from privileging the visual. For, naked though they may be, bodies are always adorned with ideas about them; they come always already represented. Counterintuitively, representation is what gets naturalized. What might it be, then, to paint a naked body with such a critique in mind? For a start, a smart painter must eschew any affected true-to-life figuration contiguous with Naturalism (a school in nineteenth-century painting concerned with keeping things real). Not least, as pursuing too much realism can make things quite kitsch. In addition, they should avoid the prurience of reality TV. Pushing deeper into the pornographic is also to be avoided, as one cannot snatch victory from glory holes. Some parameters, then, for a Queer Naturism in painting.
An elfin youth stares out of a window at billowing smokestacks. In another canvas, a naked boy reclines in grass before an oil refinery. To certain eyes the scenes are pastoral bastardizations of a Socialist Realist motif—namely, matter-of-fact men with solid forearms and calloused hands, wearing heavy coats, and black boots, undertaking the passionate toil of homo sovieticus. Dúbravský’s switch-outs are closer to the nude bathers in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, though a fright more profligate in modelling and a lot more homo. If such pictures amount to a ‘post-Soviet’ mood, it is through depictions of the repose possible after the passing of the revolutionary male’s pictorial epoch. These are visions born after the industrial project of naturalizing the Soviet endeavour in the form of unreal human figures.
Dúbravský’s bodies are at leisure, near but definitely separate from the site of labour. But perhaps describing them as being at leisure misses their coolness: with callow eyes and faun-like shoulders they are, better put, detached. It is not so much that they appear to have taken a break from working in a factory. They were never engaged at one to begin with. Their relaxed nudity compounds this impression: not, we surmise, having been stripped of a worker’s costume, or having cast one aside. They never wore anything of the sort. However, rather than being ‘innocents’, Dúbravský’s boys are dandies who wear colours on their (naked) sleeves, and blush on their cheeks. Such colours always hue slightly different. Taken together, they amount to a painter’s rainbow; one which demonstrates how every body is a picture to the degree that it is person. Clothes are not the issue.
Dúbravský’s colourful boys shimmer with a formal tension between realistic modelling and watery dissolution. Across his oeuvre, mark-making oscillates between loose and economical. Occasionally, one even detects the trace of traditional Chinese painting; as in a previous series of works that depict roosters—a classic motif—in oils handled like ink. At his most painterly, his outlines bleed into body, and the borders between expression and accident blur. Some of his compositions teeter right on the precipice of falling apart, held together ‘just so’ by only the most lightly worn technique, and an eye that knows an awful lot about the historical canon. The latter has seen enough to know that the nature of the pictorial imaginary is always in flux. In their many-coloured coolness, Dúbravský’s figures are contemporary subjects.
Certainly, we have observed that they cast detached eyes upon industrial facilities and belching chimneys. However, there is more to unpick. While the artist’s colourful dandies are far from ecstatic, they do not appear especially disappointed. In fact, they look at home. In this comportment they further demonstrate their contemporaneity, as opposed to modernity: Unlike the conceptual disavowal of urbanization pursued by nineteenth-century naturists, these scenes indicate some understanding of the fact that landscapes, like bodies, are also already pre-mediated. But this pre-mediation takes place at the level not only of ideas, but also of the material consequences of human activity. In such paintings, what would pass for the natural world is already shot through—or, should we say, sculpted—by conditions of humankind’s making; pollution, anthropogenic climate change, and more. In this, they are true to the times we live in: wherever we look, we find our own species reflected.
In Dúbravský’s garden-studio, in rural Slovakia, this reflection takes various forms. When the artist turns to paint fruit his brush ends up harvesting apples with grinning schoolboy faces. Shiny, ripe, smiling in self-satisfaction, or solicitation, they are so many glimmers of an anthropocene narcissus. Another series of paintings—this time, featuring caterpillars—even grants an invasive species (the fruit of migration due to climate change) the honour of having their portraits taken. In both instances our erstwhile painter of nudes displays another tendency; that of being a naturalist—one who, in the tradition of Linnaeus, observes and catalogues ‘found’ organisms and their habitat. If body-positive naturism (i.e., FKK) attributes a high level of normativity to ‘nature’, then scientific naturalism is a descriptive enterprise that accepts any and all diversity. While a naturalist may harbour pretensions, and particular enthusiasms, they are ultimately engaged in describing rather than demanding things from what they observe. This frame helps one understand a common tension that is present in Dúbravský’s work. Namely, that however expressive the marks on the canvases are, the subject matter is often handled with a naturalist’s ability to suspend emotional judgement and just run with the matter at hand.
For a painter, adopting the accepting eye of the naturalist opens up a world of possibility. In the current exhibition, a central suite of paintings features groups of naked young men, running. Invariably filling up all of the pictorial space, and presented without visual context, it is impossible to discern where these figures are, where they have come from, or where they are going. And yet, the pictures suggest certain iconographic references. Specifically, depictions of footraces at the original Olympics—that ancient pageant of nude physical competition. For those who, like this writer, cannot help this accultured reading, the runners’ nudity arrives clothed in classical allusion. In a popular culture where nudism is a minority interest, the prospect of naked sport (even perambulation) makes one think of another, more dignified, time. However, the source material underpinning Dúbravský’s runners is more prosaic: still frames from an introductory scene to a pornographic video.
In light of the source material, the nature of the painted runners’ nudity is mentally redrawn: It moves away from a pre-modern mythos that is, we observe, adjacent, in terms of use-value, to valorisations of nudity outside time in a state of nature. As it stands, the so-called ‘rebirth’ of the Olympic spirit in the form of the modern Olympic games was also part the late-nineteenth-century ‘life-reform’ project. But the runner’s nudity does not issue from an imagined arcadia, or temporary respite from daily life. It is work. For pornographic nudity is a wholly industrial enterprise. In the new attention economy of the Internet, the bodies of sex workers toil, hammering away at their tasks, and even letting machines work on them, in the service of image production and distribution. Such workers are less than unclothed; more naked than nude. Perhaps it falls to an artist such as Dúbravský to re-view their bodies, such that their instrumentalization at the hands of a hypermodern media industry is overpainted, in the colours of a butterflies, latent in a caterpillar.