Jouissance
Medium: Oil / Cold Wax / Collage on Panel
French feminist writer Hélène Cixous used the term jouissance to describe a form of women's pleasure or sexual rapture that combines mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of female experience, bordering on mystical communion. She maintained that jouissance is the source of a woman's creative power and that the suppression of jouissance prevents women from finding their own fully empowered voice.
My goal for this new year is to embrace and harness jouissance and channel it into my paintings.
This piece is unframed but is wired for hanging.
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This painting was accepted and is currently exhibiting at the San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild Spring Exhibition, an international juried online exhibition. The exhibition runs March 1 - April 30, 2022
Responses (4)
July 20, 2022
LOVE IT 🔥 and I love when I learn something new from viewing artwork!
February 24, 2022
congratulations. I like the layered quality. It suggests that there are layers hidden just beyond reach.
February 28, 2022
Thank you! Layering is a huge part of my process. It's almost like a chess game in the need to think about what you want the possibility of showing through in later layers.
February 24, 2022
Congratulations on being in the show! Love the colors - striking and bold...
February 23, 2022
I don’t know nearly enough about Hélène Cixous and her theories of sexual liberation and empowerment to properly engage with Kym Balthazar Fetsko’s "Jouissance" on an appropriately thorough philosophical level. Still, I find the work and its inspiration too intriguing to resist writing about. The free-flowing brushwork and joyfully haptic applications of pigment evoke a sense of liberation and a refusal to bend to the expectations of constrictive culture. All too often, we don't know what we want till it's gone, or at least it feels that way. However, there is an alternative way to interpret our indecisiveness and seeming lack of awareness: we do know what we want; we just don't know how to know what we want. Pleasure is pleasurable and often doesn't need to be questioned further. Yet, we are stifled under so many centuries of tradition and prejudice that we cannot distinguish our desires from those prescribed to us. In this way, liberation (sexual or otherwise) is akin to painting: the radical freedom of obliterating the guidelines of figuration and submerging oneself in the freedom of abstraction could be applied to the restrictions of our behavior.
February 28, 2022
Thank you, John, for your very insightful thoughts about "Jouissance." You may sense a theme in my recent paintings.
March 07, 2022
Thank you I learned a great deal from this work and am really enjoying reading Cixous
March 10, 2022
I can't say I've read much more past the summary of her work, lol! But it is on my reading list. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Thank you again!
- Category
- Abstract, Abstract Expressionism
- Type
- Painting - Unframed
- Materials
- Oil, Canvas
- Dimensions
-
18.00 inches wide
18.00 inches tall
1.50 inches deep - Weight
- 4.00 lbs
- Location
- Dunmore, PA, US
