Ana Fuentes review
In the history of art and literature, the prepubescent girl as subject has always made us uncomfortable. Artists such as Carroll, Nabokov, and Balthus fixed their gaze upon that liminal space between innocence and knowledge, creating in their works an exquisitely tenuous balance of purity and perversity. Their art is entrancing, yet it makes us feel as if on the verge of something illicit. The preternatural girls in Ana Fuentes's paintings are unsettling too, but in quite the opposite way. Here the male gaze is absent, and so is any trace of sensuality. Rather, it is the young girls who stare directly at us. They may be more fully clothed than Balthus's languorous beauties, but even in their prim Victorian fashions they strike us as infinitely more vulnerable. It is their interior worlds, not their bodies, which are raw and exposed. Fuentes understands innocence not as the absence of knowledge but as the refusal to abandon h...
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