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The vanished extremities and constrained
poses offer intriguing questions: Is the beautiful woman holding her
hands behind her back or is she restrained? Is the mouth that we cannot
see gagged? Does she assume this position to satisfy her private desires
or for entertainment of the viewer? Whether poised and relaxed or restrained
and thrust to the forefront, the women beg these questions from the
viewer.
We are reminded that Kissmer's choice of composition is in itself
the basis of the artist's themes. Themes are of duality: themes
of restraint and expression, of pride and submission, themes of mystery
and revelation.
The artist's careful, almost ritualized, use of fabric on the
female form provokes mysterious feelings, feelings rooted in our most
basic understanding of beauty and love. These feelings, evoked by his
work, created important parallels to our everyday visual experience.
A visual experience that has become bombarded with a display of the
female nude, with the female form blatant in its reference to
materialism and seduction.
Kissmer 's controlled and artful compositions work
within this experience to create important artistic parallels. Through
an artistic placement of exotic and theatrical elements, Kissmer creates
a foil to the popular but banal themes of nudity and seduction. Fabric
is especially useful in realizing this: By using the cloth to wrap and
bind the female forms, he develops haunting fetish themes, These themes
transcend popular iconography by drawing reference to the most primordial
and mysterious roots of human spirituality, as demonstrated in "Kleiner
Fetisch" (Little Fetish).
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