John Currin has established himself by painting controversial depictions of female subjects in a surreal Rockwellian technique.  Labeled as a mannerist, caricaturist, radical conservative or simply prankster, the artist continues to evade categorization. This Detroit exhibition is the  first public showing of the artist's source photography.

"Through photography," admits the artist, "subject matter, as such, ceases to be of primary importance to me. Instead, I find myself involved in the relationships of these subjects."

With this series Currin hopes to joggle the hierarchy of gazing. These are not his own images. They are reproductions of things we have all seen or experienced. They are imitations conjured from a collective libido.

Most of the photographs in this exhibition aren't so much about sex or sex acts as about a display of craft, but of course such graphic display is in itself a sex act. The sex act in which art is grounded to eroticism, and, thereby, cleverly tries to avoid the label of pornography.

"Actually the figures in my New York show are painted from many of these photographs,” explains Currin. “But then, the assumption that all those images are secondhand isn't really accurate either. I do think photography has become a great leveling force for me. I've tried to use photography to get at a greater particularity--of pose or gesture or light.  The fragments, wherever they're from, work together like images in a poem, to form this new whole. So in the end, my photography is like these love poems that inspire my paintings."

The fascinating thing about all these photographs is the way the softened tumble of imagery replicates the physical sensation of sex. Skin is suffused with the blush of sexual arousal. Everything is hazy, incomplete, and yet engorged with longing--a seductive pageant of orifices and sex organs.

Why now? The history of photography is replete with nudes and pornography. Such images have become indispensable within photographic development. And within the development of painting as well. “I feel that even greater potentialities will develop through thinking of painting and photography together,” the artist argues for himself, “not dividing them.

“And as for sexual content, when I began to make these I suddenly thought:  We are all even, equal, nobody is more important than anybody else, and at the same time everybody is unique. I quickly realized the subject matter acted as a leveling agent for potentialities as well as this new medium.  In every art school in the world there’s a guy doing porn. That’s kind of interesting to me.”

With this series, in the end, Currin does not intentionally mean to describe nor explore the value of sex or pornography in the information age. And yet, more than a few of these works look like that sort of graphic love that Larry Flynt would have commissioned for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. So, pornography it often is, and John Currin is the art world's new sex professional. There is no lack of champions in this category -- Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Richard Kern, Andres Serrano  -- but no other recent attempts in this new millennium have so clearly lionized sexual transgression to such an elegant degree.