Presentation of the book Voluptuario at Rizzoli, New York. 1996

VOLUPTUARIO

LAURA ESQUIVEL

The richness of Brian Nissen's images and Carlos Fuentes astonishing text inspire ideas and sensations more given to feeling than verbalizing. However I will try to articulate some thoughts that delight has teased out of me.

To confront desire is easier than to talk about desire - which explains our need to substitute the object of our desire by evoking another reality, absent and unnamable. Desire, together with the impossibility of talking about it, stimulates a wealth of invention. To name the unnamable we have to resort to calling the same object by other names, and so that the unmentionable becomes evermentionable: the object is not just itself or its name, but rather all that it alludes to, all the names it evokes.

This play of complex reconstruction has held a fascination for western culture in particular moments of its history, and especially defined the path of the art of certain countries. As Carlos Fuentes says: "... in the lands of necessity (Mexico, Spain) ... the distances between desire and its object are (or have been) immense. This is certainly the strongest and perhaps the most positive tradition of the Indo-Iberian world: It suffuses popular art, painting and writing with an urgency that it would not have if the desire could be materially accomplished.

However, in spite of this fateful mask, the game of substituting the name of the object of desire has engendered expressions rich in ambiguity, and thanks to their free and vibrant character, these substitutions are impregnated with great doses of pleasure; Joyful, playful, spasms of pleasure.

In Mexico, the "albur" consists of a double-edged, two-faced play on words. This play-pun is one of the popular forms of expression that most clearly exemplifies the urge to reconstruct - in its absence - the name of the object of desire. Around a universe of innuendo, which ends up as a great and unique sexual pun, reference to male and female genitals undergo an endless metamorphosis until becoming crystallized, inevitably embedded in our language, moment by moment impregnating our daily speech. Genitals are spoken about without mentioning them. Chewed up and imagined. Detected by the word that hides them, we find them, as it were, not where they belong, but rather on the tip of our tongue.

Brian Nissen, a strange cultural cocktail of British - Iberian - Mexican culture - a New York- Mexico D.F. denizen- reminds us with his Voluptuario of the most typical and jubilant mechanisms of the Mexican 'albur'. He shows us something in order to hide it, to say without saying. Hinting, smiling at our complicity, and the genial pleasure of the genitals, the expression of pleasure. The names of desire appear and disappear in a dizzy play of language, eyes, salt, everyday happenings, the joy of living. Because, if the object is desire - as Carlos Fuentes says of Tantalus - 'forever within his reach, forever receding from his grasp'- we are destined to recreate it at every moment, in every gesture, and in every act of our daily life.

From the toothbrush, the salt shaker, the repetition of the daily dance, sex leaps out converted into words, gestures, flavors, aromas - in our own special way of dousing everything we eat with chile, investing our daily food with erotic connotations.

We say chile for prick, tooth prick, a smooth trick. We say that sex is on everyone’s tongue. Mickey Mouth. It comes out in every word. In the formation of every word that sounds the same and mirrors our desire.

The 'albur'! The play-pun. Joy to the word! Nissen paints puns, draws lines drawing. Joy to the eye, says aye to the eye. If we enter the game, the play-pun of Brian Nissen and Carlos Fuentes the inevitable result will be entry into everyday erotica, spontaneous, elemental and vital. To be penetrated by the image is to be penetrated by the text. In the maze of allusions in which the object of our desire seems ethereal, it escapes our gaze although it is looking at us screwing around and loving.

Brian Nissen invests his version of this form of absent-presences in his imagery. Eroticism, voluptuousness are engraved in his lines, in the invocation that summoned the lines. When we see the image of a figure man-handling the pants of another, it arouses fantasies our own hidden objects of desire. We savor the secret, we screw with the secret and are intensely happy. One has to eat oneself, imbibe sex with ones eyes, with the tongue, with whatever one can. Not in vain that in Mexico, as Brian and Carlos well know, the verbs to eat and to screw are synonymous.

With Carlos Fuentes, the 'play-pun' expands the language, makes it flow. It becomes a play of mirrors; what appears over there appears over here and their meanings disappear because the words refer to something other than what we thought. What is said is meant another way. The sound of the word also carries its meaning. Through his voice images reveal themselves like rebels opening a breach, liberating fantasies from their repressed moral orbits. He shows that the game of the 'albur' - the play-pun, implies dialogue, demands ingesting- incesting the other, the listener. The ambiguity of the rules also allow for the pleasure of being done to, even if only through wangling, wrangling, wanking words.

The intuitive invention of the 'albur' is like a literary device in which a text is infused with a sub-text that evokes other texts. Cervantes Don Quixote contains stories from other sources: Eliot's 'Wasteland' evokes the presence of Baudelaire, Dante, Wagner, Shakespeare and others. How much of Ulysses is in Joyce or Joyce in Ulysses? Fuentes fountain? And so with other literary invocations more or less intentional whose principal function is to conjure up a game of ghostly presences as masterfully played by Fuentes, full of juice, flavor and the constancy of original creation.

It may be that in the relationship between pleasure and the expression of pleasure by way of humor, that Brian Nissan and Carlos Fuentes have uncovered mysterious and subtle links that fuse British and Mexican temperaments. And with this great encounter we are left speechless. An ideal way to master debate.