Anatomization of mental experience.

Anatomization of Mental Experience

I tend to describe what I do as an anatomization of psycho-emotional experience.
There is a certain manifested body language, a primally named feeling, a proto-affect of life that is of course placed into the body and it signals through it. Precious spontaneity, set within the well-prepared garden of method. Figurativeness in any realm is the high-speed train of poetry.

The body is truly reactive, and in the moment of being infected with feeling it is like transparent water, where events unfold, whether a caiman has caught an eternal duck by the tail, whether the river is stained with blood, whether the gold of plunder is mingled with sand and an octopus guards its carrion. My imagination is greatly captivated by temple dancers and by the symbol of silence, in which the spoken word is anticipated by the shudder of a hand. And even the voice pouring forth without foresight, torn away from the function of speech, retains muteness and frailty.

//Birth is a two-way trauma.
The child tears both foundation and cause, while the maternal being struggles to leave her own body, now a painful gatekeeper. The father, with a round dance, portrays the woman in labor, screaming, devouring earth. Camels lie down in the sands and are lulled by roaring morinhuur.

The father says: “I know how you will be born, my son.” And yet at the same time he is forever deprived of such knowledge. The father in the ritual of birth becomes the portrait of his mutilated wife, created to confuse the gods of transitional spaces. But here lies the trick: man is crowned with this gatekeeping state of passage and from the very beginning endlessly replaces himself with himself.

The child, claimed by the clan through the expressive signs of its first omens, inherits land, hunt, sequence, hunger, and principles. But the unacknowledged child is sold, he is foreign, he is fertilizer for lifeless soil. He must summon goodness, he must himself become food for the beast, he must awaken the fields. He himself is principle.

On Decapitation and the Grenade.

I approach certain forms of execution and images of martyrdom also through the prism of dance. Their confessional weight may indeed have meaning. Yet above all, these images are desirable to me, provoking a playfulness native to the most naïve state in contexts where grand drama reigns. For me, the play with such metaphors is a kind of burning out of putrid structures within narrated imagery, they allow me to cope with what has been lived and created, to confront named experience, cutting off its head at will, separating myself and separating it.

Grenades crown all this revelry, replacing the entrails scattered across the canvas with copper rivers and silver streams. They are doorways, inversions, funerary feasts, and tons of unburied bodies transformed into a ball of voluptuousness. Tactless laughter. Blissful foolishness, and the laughter of a crowned infant who commands that all principles be reversed.