Guest curator Clare Cumberlidge of the newly relaunched Erotic Review invites artist Richard Malone to transform the magazine “into an erotic encounter”
This excerpt is taken from Erotic Review:
Turn the pages slowly. There are questions here.
As guest art curator of the Erotic Review’s issue 4, I’ve chosen to depart from the tradition of previous editions by collaborating with a single artist. I’ve invited them to fully inhabit the space, to intervene in your physical experience of the magazine – transforming the ‘thingness’ of this issue, this object, into an erotic encounter in itself.
Richard Malone’s work takes us beneath and beyond speech. The folds, hands, drapes, postures, smudges and stitches they create form their own language, talking of play, labour, love and delight.
Perusing and scanning artworks, deliberating over an artist to engage with, I was caught and held by Temperance – the surprisingly erotic wall painting Malone made with their father. Created through a meticulous and repetitive process, Temperance resists virtual encounter and demands to be experienced in the flesh. Viewed in shifting patterns of light, it offers a subtle and poetic reward for the senses, an assertion of the joys and frissons to be found in close looking. We are directed to slow down and experience the visual and aesthetic pleasures created by its shifts in colour and the feel of the paper in our hands.
In their text, Malone introduces us to the realities of class and labour that underpin their practice. Born in Ireland, they learnt stitching and embroidery from their grandmother before beginning their working life as a painter and decorator with their father. That was followed by a fashion degree at Central St Martins and the evolution of a practice that cuts across art and fashion. Their work is a marriage of sensual playfulness and the political and economic structures that underpin our intimate engagement with the world and with each other.
, 2025)
The sequence circles around the body – appearing, disappearing and transforming, there and not there in its physical presence. Embodiment and gesture. Malone’s wire and cloth sculptures are modelled on their own body, the gestures an indexing of a queer iconography that encompasses Sally Bowles’s knees and Carrie Bradshaw smoking a cigarette.
The gestural paintings – splurges and splashes – are indecently luscious. Evoking the brushmarks of abstract expressionism, these marks have a different form of agency. Rather than standing as symbols of individualism and capitalist free will, they invite us to share in the pleasure, egalitarian and collective. Are we the surface or the action?
All of Malone’s work is made by hand. Texture, stitches, feel and touch. We feel the materiality – silky satin, rough canvas, the elegant soft drape of a plastic dust sheet against a hard stone fireplace. Malone’s work claims the value of being there, wholly present. This is a book, not a screen. We cannot slide off the image – it is made of material and labour, texture and sweat alongside pleasure.
In creating this collage of imagery, Malone deploys a colour palette that moves between languor and rapture, a wit that dangles the promise of laughter during sex and a rhythm that is compelling and mysterious. The work suggests a gloriously accepting eroticism drenched in tenderness, weaving the poetic in with the prosaic and the political.
Issue 4 of Erotic Review is available now. Reference Point will host the London launch of Issue 4 on October 18. Richard Malone’s limited edition series of 30 unique artworks are on display this week at Reference Point, London. Erotic Review is designed and art directed by Studio Frith.
