ARCHETYPES cycle

2011

21 × 60 × 7 cm

Canvas work, padded with jute and stitched with ropes. Mixed media.

Plexiglass box.

The encounter with the archetypes took place during a phase of my psychoanalytic experience. A “magical” moment, evidently one of searching for the Divine. They “revealed” themselves. The drawings were kept for many years, until it became “necessary” and urgent to represent them three-dimensionally.

This “necessity” arose as a reaction to a world lost in hyper-distinction and hyper-criticism. In the desert of intellectualism, it refuses to remain at the mercy of “forces” that cannot be brought under our control. These forces, gods and demons, these primitive Mana, have not disappeared; they have merely lost contact with our consciousness. Forgotten in watertight compartments of our psyche, “they” have changed their names. (See Barbie.)

I have isolated the Archetypes in transparent boxes. They are primordial images, symbols suspended in a kind of two-dimensional–three-dimensional space. Enclosed in plexiglass boxes like blister packs, displayed on a supermarket stand, they are ready for purchase. Now, they are accessible merchandise. Dehydrated, isolated, reduced to fetishes of themselves. Creatures embalmed, worn away by time. Even as forgotten simulacra, they remain dangerous and powerful.

The Black Magician has remained elusive and fearsome, even when bound and boxed, as has the heroic Warrior. Their skin—wounded canvas, covered with scars—tells their story. The passage of time is expressed through the worn colour, archaic and primitive, evoking a past lost in the mists of time.

The tears and wounds are forcibly held open by clamps, stitches and ties, as on an operating table. They expose the entrails, the Inside, the hidden content. They are forced to reveal their mystery to probing eyes, as in a dissection. (Siamese – Barbie)

The Great Mother, La Loba, is represented as half woman and half beast. The generative and erotic power of the human body merges with the animal—pure instinct. She is the protective mother and the terrifying mother at once. She is the mother who nourishes; she is the mother who devours.