The New York Times, May 8, 2005
ART REVIEW; Erotic Goes Mainstream
By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

The first thing you think when you enter an exhibition of erotic drawing at the
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., is, um, porn. The tone is set by works like Georgia Marsh's drawings, near the entrance, of love-making with her male studio model.
Then again, art history has long been enriched by art that seems, at first, to be
pornographic: Courbet's ''Sleepers,'' for example, or Rodin's ''Kiss.'' The Rodin was railed off and draped in a sheet after its display in a provincial English art gallery early last century occasioned heated public protest.
Though prudery is, I hope, no longer reason for outrage and anger at art, erotica has not attracted the sort of sober scholarly or curatorial eye given to other genres of image-making: still life, say, or portraiture, history and landscape painting. Those for whom art embodies a lofty, spiritual purpose tend to doubt the validity of images so openly dealing with the pleasures of the flesh.
But in an unfocused way, the Aldrich exhibition, which includes 103 works by 33 artists -- mostly Americans and a few Britons -- points up a truth about the present art world: In studios everywhere artists are making sexually charged art of one kind or another. By showing us so much work by such a diverse lot of artists, in so many media and styles, this show destroys the illusion that eroticart is now anything other than a ubiquitous, mainstream art form.
Nor is it a coincidence that the curators have chosen to zero in on drawing. The erotic work of artists has always been confined largely to drawing, partly because it is the most intimate of art forms, and partly because painting and sculpture require patient thought and finish perhaps inappropriate to this subject. Erotic art is all about agitated passions, and freedom from conventions.
The curators here have researched widely and made inspired, even unusual choices.
Among the many finds are Ruth Waldman, an artist from New York City who has not shown much previously (she heard about the exhibition and sent the curators her slides), and Juan Gomez, who makes Picasso-esque drawings infused with reference to Maya sculpture. Both are interesting new names.
There are also more established artists, like Alice Attie, whose funky pen-and-ink drawings made of swirls of tiny text resemble nipples and torsos; Danica Phelps, who does illustrations of sexual coupling; and Mark Dean Veca, who makes finicky, detailed, synopsis-like ink drawings of erotica worldwide. His drawing here is a one work erotic exhibition, and pretty steamy.
The exhibition definitely gets an A-plus for thematic diversity, with references to bestiality (Leon Golub), sodomy (Stephen Andrews), masturbation (Chloe Piene), castration anxiety (Cristina Lucas), tantric sex (Huston Ripley), bodily fluids (Paul Henry Ramirez) and allusions to child pornography (Kim McCarty). Sometimes this stuff is funny, but mostly it is somewhat hypnotic.
Simon English, a London-based artist in his 40's, departs from bluntness and
desperation. His drawings contain ''a strange mix of childhood imagery and sexuality, but somehow avoid any hint of child sexuality,'' as Mark Hughes, director of Galerie Lelong in New York City, which represents the artist, said when I called to ask about Mr. English's work. His execution is also mature, with some aspects of the imagery recalling Old Master drawings.
Mr. English builds his own narrative, but he also invites you to build others, to seek out and put connecting images together. I like that, for it takes his drawings out of the realm of the merely kinky (although they are that, too) and allows for speculation on themes beyond sex.
It is also a truism of art exhibitions that context colors interpretation. Lynne Woods Turner's intricate line drawings seen in another context, for instance, may not seem like eroticism, while a completely unrelated outdoor sculpture by Roman de Salvo, of a life-size cannon shooting water, suddenly takes on erotic overtones.
Then again, once you begin to think about it, almost anything can seem erotic: a skyscraper, an airplane or any tropical fruit. For this reason the central limitation of erotic drawings may simply be that the subject matter is so basic, so blatantly obvious, that, for viewers, it leaves very little room for the imagination.