Patrick Zaia’s Womb Room and Untitled (Condom) seduce the viewer, luring them into an environment inspired by everything from Freud to film. With an idolisation of the ‘Double-Davids’ (Cronenberg and Lynch), Zaia creates a series that can be summed up by: sex, abjection and a love of human flesh. This series has a strong masculine tone that can be traced back to Zaia’s strong, deliberate brushwork and phallic subject matter. However this is challenged by the domestic hand-sewn nature of the second work, adding a touch of femininity to the series, further playing on this idea of sex and the body. Zaia states that the series looks primarily into “the awkward relationship we have with the body.” And, although the body is absent in both works, Zaia still maintains to stir up the notion that while the human exterior is admired for its ‘aesthetic packaging’, our interior bodies remain ‘grotesque’ with their gory qualities and need for excretion.
By Shannon Tonkin
