Chuck Samuels lives and works in Montréal. Thanks to the gallery ClampArt, New York has just acquired his series Before the Camera which had raised a lot of eyebrows in Québec. The artist stages his self-portraits, ironically replacing the feminine model in the original work with his male alter ego. Although the series could be interpreted as gay, Chuck Samuels aims rather at producing iconoclastic photography. Faithfully reconstructing a couple dozen photographs of female nudes created by well-known photographers, Samuels deliberately creates a glaring parody which challenges the role of the model in front the lens of an average photographer.
His caustic, ironic photographs are inspired as much by cinema, psychoanalysis, and art history as by advertisement, mass media, and underground cultures (including queer). The intention is always the same: to perturb the viewer through various ambiguous narratives using both black and white and color or by bringing into play the space outside the frame or distorting the image.
The more “scandalizing” photos raise questions of the future of art, of “monstrosity,” and of tempestuous humanity which Socrates wanted to put an end to by offering humans eternity, that is a supreme Good, a God as a precursor, or rather a pre-curse of monotheism. Often targeted by censors, who strike hard as soon as someone wonders what “evil” lurks in these images, Samuels’ photographs are much less scandalous than many of those that cater to mainstream tastes. In a raw, perverse, and funny way, his controversial work turns paradise and hell on their heads. In a world that once again conspires against hopes and expectations, we face a new kind of subjectivity: orgasmic.
