Porn or Not Porn: Is That the Question?

Marianne Tricot’s Réjouissances is a series of small-format oil paintings depicting sex scenes, images of love, or simply moments of intimacy. It began when Marianne found some tiny frames at a flea market. They sparked a desire to portray intimacy and people making love.

Why choose to depict sex scenes? What artistic choices and ambitions lie behind that decision? Marianne Tricot and Olympe de Gê, essayist and director of feminist pornography, discuss the questions that arise when we depict pleasure.

Olympe de Gê

When I first discovered your images, I was struck by the indistinctness of your sex scenes and the way it blurs gender boundaries. Then, as I kept looking, the succession of positions and the sheer number of bodies made me think: this is pornography! Where did the idea for your series Réjouissances come from?

Marianne Tricot

I was surprised myself to realise that this book could be described as pornographic. At the time, I hadn’t set out to make pornography at all, nor had I anticipated that bringing these images together in a book would raise that question. I started the series in 2022. I’d found some tiny frames at a flea market that must once have held family photographs. They sat around my studio for a while because I didn’t know what to do with them. When I finally picked them up, I wanted to make the most of their small scale. I liked the idea that you would have to come closer to see what was being depicted… I wanted to show something intimate, and that led to the idea of portraying sex scenes.

O. G.

How do you make the images in this series?

M. T.

I start with pornographic images. I make a preparatory drawing on tracing paper, which serves as my starting point. That gives me shapes that I transfer onto a sheet of paper. I cut those shapes out and work on them with oil pastels. Combining cutting, collage and pastel allows me to move away from an overly polished representation towards something raw and non-realistic.

O. G.

There’s something playful about that!

M. T.

Yes! Making these little paintings brought me enormous joy. I initially conceived of them as individual vignettes, each displayed separately on a wall. The small format seemed appropriate for a subject that can make people uncomfortable. I didn’t want to force anyone to look at them. In a book, seeing the images one after another tells a different story.

O. G.

That approach—being able to move closer to an image or not, to choose to step back and disengage—connects with my own thinking about consent. When I made feminist porn, I felt it was important for my films to be behind a paywall. I wanted people to make an active choice to watch them. I liked to think that those who watched my films did so thoughtfully, aware of the ideas they conveyed. Paying to watch my porn also meant recognising that sex work is work: it requires human, financial and creative resources, and involves a set of values.

M. T.

Do you expect a certain commitment from the people watching your films?

O. G.

I think so, yes. I put a lot of myself into my films: my creativity, my imagination, but also my body and the authenticity of my pleasure. I want viewers to share certain values with me. Your vignettes are quite paradoxical: they’re very explicit, yet they show no detail. We can make out bodies, but rarely genitals or breasts, and never facial expressions. When we do see genitals, we can’t quite tell whether it’s a phallus or a vulva! Is withholding that information a way for you to critique pornography? Because we realise that, ultimately, those details aren’t necessary to depict pleasure at all!

M. T.

Yes, the scenes are clearly recognisable even though the bodies have no faces. We can’t always assign them a gender, either. It’s more of a pictorial choice, a desire to simplify forms. At this scale, I’m interested in the material qualities of pastel because it doesn’t allow me to dwell on details, but instead on volume and light. I also deliberately chose to pull back from the bodies so that we see them whole, whereas porn fragments them through extreme close-ups. In fact, I was wondering: when you made your pornographic films, did you set out to film particular parts of the body? Did you have specific framing in mind, or a sense of how close you wanted to be to the scene?

O. G.

I made a film, Don’t Call Me a Dick [2017, produced by Erika Lust], with extreme close-ups of genital areas. I wanted to capture every tiny sign of pleasure in the genitals, but also on the skin, in body hair and on the face. I wanted to reveal beauty by getting as close as possible, directing our gaze towards places it doesn’t usually go. For example, I filmed a female ejaculation in slow motion at a thousand frames per second, with incredibly powerful lighting. It looked like a shower of diamonds! To me, all those tiny movements become expressions of pleasure and emotion.

M. T.

My images tend to zoom out instead. The bodies and their surroundings are treated in the same way visually. Those feelings come through in the overall atmosphere of the scene and the action depicted. Applying pastel with brisk gestures can create a sense of vibration in the bodies just as much as a breeze moving through the curtains. A colour can convey the warmth of a face. The colour composition as a whole also gives the scene its intensity or softness.

O. G.

Yes, that’s exactly it: you can feel the energy, the dizzying sensation of sex, despite the tiny format! The porn films I made were alternative and feminist, but they were also part of a commercial industry. That meant including a prescribed number of penetration scenes, a requirement I would gladly have done without! To accommodate one performer’s comfort, we had to simulate one of those scenes in my first film, The Bitchhiker [2016, produced by Erika Lust]. And in the end, just as you describe, I was able to bring out the erotic tension between the characters and their pleasure, using slightly psychedelic effects reminiscent of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. The most creative ideas came from playing with old objects, just as with your flea-market frames. We had some etched-glass cups that created a kaleidoscopic effect when placed in front of the lens. It was a way of making pleasure and intoxication visible.

M. T.

You also perform in The Bitchhiker. How did you feel about making pornography and putting yourself out there in the world?

O. G.

First of all, I felt immense pride in asserting myself as a woman with desires of her own. Sharing that pride with other women brought me a lot of joy. Daring to do all of that gave me confidence at that point in my life! Some ambivalence emerged, too. To me, porn is a cultural product like any other. It simply focuses on showing unsimulated sex. You can approach it in an embodied, personal way—or not. Before long, viewers started telling me whether or not my films had aroused them. Of course I know that people may choose to masturbate while watching porn, but I didn’t want to discuss their sex lives with them! Did you think about how people would react to your vignettes?

M. T.

If there’s one thing I never asked myself, it’s whether they would be arousing. That wasn’t my intention at all. In fact, I wanted people to be able to feel something entirely different when looking at paintings depicting sex. I wanted them to invite laughter, daydreaming or conversation. And even when I was looking for screenshots on porn sites, I quickly found myself far removed from any sense of sexual arousal. I went to those sites to find the materials I needed: they became image banks that helped me realise the idea I had in mind. For me, that was all there was to it, which puzzled quite a few people around me and sparked a lot of discussion.

O. G.

On a personal level—if you’d like to talk about it—what led you to make Réjouissances?

M. T.

The desire to depict sex scenes came at a point in my life when I needed to see the subject represented through something other than highly realistic or descriptive images. My work began to align with my curiosity about it, my personal reflections, conversations with friends, my reading… To me, it felt like an obvious subject, a subject like any other! It was only as I worked on the series that I realised not everyone shared that feeling. Making images from screenshots of porn sites could be unsettling. When a woman talks about porn, I get the impression that people expect her to condemn it. My approach puzzled people, or at least it was unfamiliar. Looking back, I realise that taking pornographic images and working with them through my own visual language can be seen as a form of reclaiming pornography: content originally made by men, for men.

O. G.

We probably have that in common: a creative approach that starts out almost instinctively and turns out to be political! There are so few depictions of sex created by women that bringing them into existence is a powerful act. How would you like readers to experience your images?

M. T.

I’d like these paintings to bring joy! This work also comes from a need to create other kinds of images that approach sex with greater tenderness and a sense of mischief. I’d love it if Réjouissances could open up conversations, including with younger people, about sex and emotional education. It would be wonderful if paintings could encourage us to reflect together on important, intimate questions that accompany us through so much of our lives.

Interview by Stephanie Estournet