11 Jun Beautiful and cruel

Photo: Erwin Olaf, Chessmen 5

The images are simultaneously beautiful and cruel, both erotic and repulsive. As a viewer, you are mesmerized, yet also uneasy. We are looking at Erwin Olaf’s early work: a beautiful pregnant woman, bound with ropes, wearing black, mirrored thigh-high boots with heels, her belly gently touched by a small woman, also bare-chested and in heels. Despite her hands being tied behind her back, the pregnant woman radiates pride and shows no pathetic presence. The small woman, standing backwards in front of her, is wearing a helmet and bends her head forward, her black hair loose, resembling a horse’s head. Is the strapped-in pregnant woman being led by the small woman, or is it the other way around?

Silent Spectators
I slowly shuffle with my brother from image to image. We each have our own rhythm, but I often find myself seeking him out and standing beside him for a moment. We are both silent spectators. When this series of photographs was first shown, it was shocking, and perhaps it still is. The photograph is part of a series called Chessmen. And although none of the photographs evoke a chess piece, together they do.

The painful quality of the composed photos suggests that Olaf himself suffered pain in his youth, and this suspicion is later confirmed in the accompanying text: Olaf was bullied throughout his childhood until he was 14, and later sexually assaulted by a principal at his school. The photos could also have had a therapeutic effect on Olaf himself. In that case, the pain underwent a process of transformation. From grief to blossoming. Is that the duality we see in the photos?

Breathlessness
In one of the last images, Olaf photographs himself with an oxygen tube under his nose. The artist had a lung condition and often struggled with breathing. The photo deliberately contrasts with another from his early years, in which he is depicted bare-chested with an imposing torso. This contrast is reflected again in a later series of photographs he made of his “muses,” former models re-photographed in their later years: they still stand proud and therefore movingly powerful in the photo, with wrinkled, naked bodies. Olaf has processed both the pain of his childhood and the discomfort he must endure as an adult.

Allowing unpleasant feelings
If you fail to sublimate pain, it can, for example, transform into bitterness, cynicism, and anger. It’s as if the body clamps down on the pain and can only force anger out through its pores. Pain and loss can indeed be processed, even later in life. To do this, you need to accept the pain or fear and give it space. You need to allow unpleasant feelings to be present in your body, so that they will naturally diminish and disappear. In Olaf’s photographic series, his work seems to gradually become softer and quieter.

Exhibition: Erwin Olaf at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch