Romain Slocombe
Medical Love

On display through July 22nd, 2006 the Galerie Hors Sol in Paris France present Romain Slocombe’s Medical Love, a photographic exhibition that begs the question of what is appropriate to show, and what is meant to be hidden.

Born in Paris in 1953, Romain Slocombe became known as a comic strip author and published a first bondage album, Prisoner of the Red Army, which caused a scandal at the time. Married to a Japanese woman, half-English and an utter fetishist, Romain Slocombe keeps questioning the origins of desire.

While bandaging women – Japanese women students in his early years, and moving on to young ladies from the French upper middle class – Romain Slocombe develops an aesthetic of upheaval. In a country like Japan, still traumatized by wars, the Atomic Bomb and ever imminent earthquakes, waiting for a catastrophe has in itself become an aesthetic attitude. Rebuilding, bandaging, plaster can almost be considered the emblems of the country.

By choosing his models in a society which is highly restricted by behaviour codes, Romain reacts to constraints by elaborating new constraints. It seems that young ladies from the elegant districts of Paris now embody in the eyes of Romain Slocombe this same imminent disappearance.

The young women Slocombe chooses are pretty, very much at ease with the times, neither bashful nor seducers. Falsely ill, they raise the taboo subject of medical asexuality, according to which the patient, swearing allegiance, may not be sexually used by the physician.

Together with the Exhibition a rare book will be published titled Medical Love published as a screen print, with a limited number of 100 copies.

More information about the exhibition can be found at www.galerie-hors-sol.com.