Two bodies, one standing, one prone, caught in the act of love. Through the black/white synthesis, the specific details that would identify these two people, skin tone, feature, gesture, become pure contour: the essential curve of two forms in intimate contact. What results is not a pornographic image but its opposite, the act stripped of spectacle and returned to its human fact. Paul and Wei exist here as shadow, and in that shadow, as everyone.
Two bodies, one standing, one prone, caught in the act of love. Through the black/white synthesis, the specific details that would identify these two people, skin tone, feature, gesture, become pure contour: the essential curve of two forms in intimate contact. What results is not a pornographic image but its opposite, the act stripped of spectacle and returned to its human fact. Paul and Wei exist here as shadow, and in that shadow, as everyone.
The Synonyms series has a precise origin: a 19th-century Japanese kakejiku hanging scroll at the Metropolitan Museum, in which a figure appeared as pure shadow. Sernet recognized in that image not a limitation but a method. The synthesis does what the scroll's shadow did: it removes the individual and leaves the act. In doing so it connects to the tradition of the silhouette as a form that carries meaning by withholding particulars, explored most sharply in the cut-paper works of Kara Walker, where reduction to outline was itself a political argument. Sernet's purpose is different but the formal logic is the same: what the outline removes, the viewer supplies from their own experience of being human.
The title gives two names. From those names a viewer might infer nationality, might guess at gender, might begin to construct the individuals the synthesis has dissolved. The image resists that construction. In love, the specific bodies are universal bodies, and the act that connects Paul and Wei connects, in one form or another, every human being who has ever lived.
