Monica Majoli was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. She is an American painter and Professor of Art in Painting and Graduate Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She works the seam where flesh meets mind. She takes documentary-style sexual images, often from fetish and BDSM practice, and uses them to look at intimacy, identity, and mortality, rather than as a simple shock. For adult viewers who care how fetish looks when it is handled as art, her career is a clear case: SM ritual, latex, and homoerotic detail have entered major museum collections without being flattened into pure pornography or pure theory.
In 1989 she received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1992 her MFA, in painting and drawing. From early on she worked in a slow, process-heavy studio practice. The result is separate bodies of work, not one style run straight through a career. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Yale University School of Art.
Early paintings, 1990 to 1998
In those years she worked mainly in oil on panel, on the psychological side of SM. The Whitney Museum of American Art says her figurative paintings have depicted scenes of sexual fetishism, and describes the practice as an investigation of themes and rituals of identity, intimacy, and mortality. The paintings are a place for catharsis, and they admit that the catharsis does not settle the question. She borrowed the craft of Northern Renaissance painting and of European painting from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries: a slow stack of binder and paint, used for highly detailed, realistic homoerotic scenes and for images of her own body. The explicitness is not there to record the physical thrill. It is there for the psychological weather around the acts, and for how ritualized power and pain change consciousness. In an interview she said she uses sexuality to trigger a visceral response to “the actualities of our physical nature.” SM is the main sexual form in the pictures because it “highlights the psychological nature of sexuality and consciousness.” One life-size self-portrait shows her holding a dildo. Viewers often set it next to Lynda Benglis’s 1974 advertisement. Majoli’s image is more private. It folds an art-historical reference into erotic self-scrutiny.
Rubbermen, 1999 to 2007
Rubbermen is the body of work that travelled furthest into institutional collections. The series is watercolor: men in latex rubber, many of them bound in rope and/or chains. The figures draw on Rubber Rebel, a Los Angeles fetish magazine from the mid-1990s, and on bondage product catalogs. They moved from that subculture onto the permanent shelves of modern art: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wet-in-wet watercolor, with its soft tone and its bleed, is the formal stand-in for blurred edges of desire, for anonymity inside rubber, and for the half-dissolved self that heavy gear can produce. She treats the scenes as a way to look at consciousness and at how intimacy gets complicated, not as a tourist curiosity.
Black Mirror, 2009 to 2014
Black Mirror shifts into a dark palette, with Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour behind the idea. It started from the floor-to-ceiling black mirrors that lined the master bedroom of her Los Angeles house, left by a previous owner in the 1970s. More than one mirror. The series includes portraits of women she had relationships with over about twenty-five years, drawn close-up in colored pencil on black paper, a polished chiaroscuro that feels nocturnal. The source photographs put the women in front of those mirrors. Majoli has described the “otherworldly half-image” in the black glass as matching both “the internal state of desire” and “a crisis in belief in representational painting.” In this series, she argues, the fetishistic power sits in the surface itself, rather than in the act depicted. The dark ground partly hides the women, as if they were receding. The series also deals with separation from her Italian father, a lithographer based in Milan, which is why lithography shows up on the non-representational side of the project. Black Mirror (Kate), 2010–2012, is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Blueboys, from 2015
Since 2015 she has been making Blueboys, watercolors based on images from blueboy. That magazine is treated as the first national gay magazine in the United States. Don Westbrook published it in Florida from 1974 to 2007. Majoli uses the archive as a metaphor for gay liberation and self-realization in the period before the AIDS epidemic fully reshaped public gay life. The project continues her habit of mining historical sexual media, rubber catalogs, bondage magazines, gay glossies, and reworking them in slow painting with a lot of material in it. Across the early oils, Rubbermen, Black Mirror, and Blueboys, she keeps treating sexual imagery as documentary and psychological at the same time.
