| He turns his asshole to us like the closed lense of a Leica, unflinching,
without shame, smudged with the faintest blush of shit, refusing to see us, refusing
to take our picture.
The erotic body of Matthias Herrmann is not visual: it is kinaesthetic. It is beyond gender. It is yielding, transformative. He shows us everything, every variation: with or without hair, pubus shaved or not, asshole clean or dirty, cock soft or erect, with our without cum. He displays the outward signs of an inner perversity: cockrings, tit-clamps, harness... but also pigtails, a blonde wig, a transparent slip and other ways of playing with the female self. And all his pictures are of his Self. The green self, the blue self. The erect self. The erect self with blue veins pulsing. The solar plexus. The heart, sheathed with flesh, muscle, tits, the growing (clippered) hair. The throat. That face: we all know it's called the doorway to the soul, but what many souls are these - what witches, temptresses, whores, seers, hustlers, academics, lovers, seekers, dancers, fools look so unseeingly into our eyes? I met Matthias once, very briefly, at the Basel Art Fair. He came and stood before me, not knowing, what to say. I also did not know how to speak. We exchanged pleasantries briefly, then parted. HIV +. There is nothing that so clearly teaches the lesson of the human flesh, the flesh wrapping the inner soul, the energetic body, the emotional body, the electromagnetic body, in a sheath of decomposing flesh. We are all dying. When he moves, his energy streams. I expect to see this in photos but do not. Like Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, he is all manner of men.
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