His name has become a byword for extreme sexual depravity. But was there more to the French nobleman who spent much of his life in jail? Our writer finds out at a new exhibition in Barcelona investigating his shocking work
It’s a bright, sunny day in Barcelona and I’m in a dark gallery watching a woman pull a scroll out of her vagina. Outside, skateboarders circle the CCCB, one of the city’s foremost arts centres. Inside? A naked teenage girl is eating her master’s excrement in a clip from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.
Sade: Freedom or Evil is an exhibition exploring the influence and reputation of the notorious French writer and philosopher the Marquis de Sade – from whose name the term sadism derives. It is not for the faint-hearted. It opens with a reproduction of his only extant authentic portrait, a 1760 sketch of the 19-year-old De Sade by Charles Amédée Philippe van Loo, and juxtaposes it with Joan Fontcuberta’s collage composed of 6,060 Google image search results for “Sade” and associated terms. The purpose of Fontcuberta’s piece is to depict current impressions of the Ancien Régime-Revolution straddling provocateur; amusingly, there are plenty of shots of the Smooth Operator singer mingled among entwined limbs from hardcore movies.
