Review: Natasha LeMans

General Details

There are woman who crystallizes both their beauty and their persona in a way that is almost untouchable. That occurs because these woman possesses what I call an ‘aura of transcendence.” According to German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin the definition of the aura is as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.” In the original interpretation of Benjamin aura it refers to black and white early 1900s portrait of natural scenes, such as the shadow of a branch or the sight of a distant mountain range. Those early portraits are posited conversely by Benjamin against the turn toward seriality and uniformity which shaped the experience of reality, in particular in the modern city. For him that indicated the decline—or indeed the active dismantling and destruction—of the aura of the artwork, to which the photography is the main vehicle. Thus, the artwork’s aura reflects a wider condition of modernity: “The stripping of the husk [Hülle] from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose ‘sense for sameness in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique.” Those women who still retain their auratic beauty resist the opacity of simple reproduction: their transcendence is a barrier against the 'sameness' of photographic clique’ and instead their portraits crystallize what is 'unique' about their beauty. Natasha LeMans is one of those rare women who transcendental sense of grace resist the destruction of our experience. Her portraits possess an aura because there is mystical distance associated with them; Natasha’s portraits are expression of a pure and original beauty: the experience of 'unique apparition of a distance' is thus an original one; and the aura surrounding her beauty appears as the manifestation of her uniqueness. Such uniqueness is manifested in those portraits where Natasha poses with a garden as background. In black and white her beauty assumes a mystical dimension. The link between gardens and the erotic is as old as civilization. Aphrodite-Venus became the goddess of aromatic herbs and of gardens before becoming the Goddess of Love. Erotic literature found in gardens - the Garden of Lust - an inexhaustible source of inspiration for its symbolic variations, its allegoric comparisons, and its esoteric metaphors. Natasha’s pure beauty has uniqueness because she is a contemporary Aphrodite-Venus: with her I experienced a journey onto the Garden of Lust. For this she is my only and only one Goddess of Love…VIP read on…