Tomas Esson pieces together human nature at the Hammonds House Museum
The Cuban painter takes a detour around the well-behaved superego and instead drives straight for the pulsing flesh of the id.
In El Bicho: 2008/2009, Cuban painter Tomás Esson takes a detour around the well-behaved superego and instead drives straight for the pulsing flesh of the id. The Hammonds House Museum exhibition comprises 60 of the artist’s sexiest, nastiest, most sublime works in an orgiastic feast surveying Esson’s creative output over the last 20 years.
A personal menagerie of half-human beasts and beings with confused and confusing bodies populate Esson’s large oil paintings. Rear ends substitute for breasts and a phallicized finger spits something aggressive and poisonous.