“Bacchanalia”

Bacchanalia study 2, 30x30cm, black pencil, pulp paper
This bacchanal, in black and white, is completely different from Watteau’s Fêtes galantes, and rather evokes Goya’s witchcraft scenes, if not in form, at least in spirit. In the foreground, a voluptuous female silhouette, defined by a line that is either thick or very thin and blurred, seems about to slump over the group, she is seen from behind, and her croup is pierced by an evil arrow. Her rare hair is emaciated, as if she were half bald, and her body hangs in the void, except for a fine bumpy line which may evoke a moving ground. Behind her, in the centre, we can see the puffy face, with revolting eyes, of another female figure, her left arm totally abandoned and her breasts. On the left, another woman is tilted over, her arm hanging down, her face with her mouth wide open, seemingly suffering from the throes of agony or the abyss of alcohol. A being of indeterminate sex seems to either hold her down in her fall, or to have strangled her, with his wide slug-like arm. In the background in the centre, two indistinct heads and a vigorous arm emerge from this confusion of bodies, while on the right stands the disturbing silhouette of a man with the head of a bird, threatening. All these worshippers of a dyonisiac or satanic cult mix and intertwine, fragments of bodies also appearing here and there. The deep black and dull white make this drawing look like an old photograph. Little realism though! The lines, all different, the absence of a frame, the delicacy of the line and its variety, the changing textures, everything here is masterfully orchestrated and gives rise to a scene of immense beauty, despite its highly terrifying character.

Delphine Costedoat

“Executioner, John the Baptist, Salomé”

Executioner, John the Baptist, Salomé. Ink. Khadi paper, 30x30cm
They appear and disappear simultaneously, while the gaze tries to embrace them. Each one of them alone, detached although on the same plane as the others. The executioner and Salome turn away the head of the Baptist, hooded in black, as is fitting for the condemned man. Only the female body is legible for the most part. The other two bodies are emanations of beings. It is a trap for the gaze that reconstitutes the missing or rather non-figurative parts. Towards the god of what celestial hell does the executioner, seen from the side, raise his face and his scarred eyes? His skin is covered with features like scars, more or less densely grouped. It is not the skin of a human, but that of a monster. With a reptilian brain. In the general indifference and coldness, the Baptist stands, a colossal figure, whose fragmented limbs are mentally reconstructed by the spectator, grasping his left arm as if deprived of life and charred, hanging, dead, down to his inert hand. Like the Baptist himself, a living dead man with a sealed fate. Whose immediate past and future are gone with the coldness of disdain. Carefree. For what is to come no longer matters. Is for all already happened. It is this suspended time that space restores. The closeness of the bodies moves them further apart. From the powerful stature, but with flesh and bones as if decomposed, of the Baptist, the central figure, himself scarred, crossed by horizontal hatching like poisoned arrows, emanates, pouring from his head, a series of hard but also blurred waves in the direction of Salome. They reach her at head height, and this is perhaps the only link in this composition between two of its characters. One can of course think here of Giacometti’s attempts, but of a Giacometti who would be like an actualised, of course out-of-date, whose work of capturing the essence of Being would finally be completed, and not doomed to the nothingness in which it remains forever. Once again, John Gorman uses writing as the sole medium in his composition. And the power of his commas, semicolons, dashes, parentheses, inverted commas, combines with his very particular way of drawing letters, vowels, consonants, like musical notes, to give his thoughtful work the only possible character of a work or language endowed with meaning: knowledge. (Wittgenstein).

Delphine Costedoat

“Salome’s episodes”

Salome’s episodes. 25x20cm. Ink, chalk, pencil on paper
The composition is, like a medieval or reborn altar, divided into three parts, a wide line, offset from the centre, defining, on the right, a large female figure whose body is shown simultaneously in profile and three-quarters. As the title indicates, this is one of the episodes in Salome’s life, shown here dancing, with one leg bent, the left arm raised, and wearing a slim waist, small breasts, but voluptuous buttocks and thighs. The features of her face, seen from the side, are apparent, revealing her youth and beauty, her abundant hair falling on her shoulders.The left part of the composition also shows Salome, but two figures of the same heroine occupy this part of the altar, and their scales decrease from bottom to top, and are likewise separated by a line, this time slightly oblique. At the bottom, Salome, with her face hidden under her hair, is depicted as a crucified woman, and evokes many figures from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her head hangs over her slender torso, while her long emaciated legs adopt the position that the masters of the past gave to Christ in their paintings and sculptures. At the top, an even smaller Salome reveals her rounded, slit buttocks, the rest of her body and head disappearing in a thick network of vertical lines and hatching. Perhaps a partial face shape, a wide-set eye, a gaping mouth can be guessed, which of course goes against all the laws of nature and refers here to the most daring experiments of Cubism.The two Salome’s on the left are a rereading of the ancient predella, normally arranged horizontally on the main scene, although some Renaissance works also split the altar paintings or frescoes into several scenes arranged on the same plane, although changes of scale are rare, especially to this degree. Think of the inventor of modern perspective, Masaccio, for example, and his Payment of the Tribute. In the latter work, however, there is no line separating the various episodes, as there is here. Moreover, the said line, which is made of a reddish-strand pigment, extends downwards to form the outline of the thigh, knee and leg of the great Salome on the left. We are thus escaping the models of the past here. The drawing is neither precise nor imprecise, the pencil plays with ink and charcoal to split and blur the lines, delivering a complex reading of the silhouettes and their movements or immobility. While the larger figure on the right is legible, it nevertheless adopts the same technique as those on the left, whose limbs are either perceptible or ghostly. As for the smaller figure at the top left, and as already indicated, it is only lines, so to speak, and escapes figuration. The artist’s dexterity here is admirable, for his tripartite composition remains unitary in form, despite the changes described. The main emphasis is on Renaissance Classicism-Mannerism, readjusted by Cubism and the even more advanced distortions it uses. On the left, the vertical predella in its lower part refers to the Middle Ages as well as to the Renaissance crucifixions (Michelangelo etc.), which are still being reinterpreted. As for the upper left part, it goes further than the most daring classical Cubism has ever been able to represent, and leaves us haggard and speechless. By showing here three episodes from Salome’s life, John Gorman highlights her duality as a free being, celebrating this freedom (the major figure, dancing), then crucified by the pain of her fault, her sin, then engulfed in mourning and having nothing left to offer but a blurred outline of a body, perhaps a face ravaged and incredulous, before the extent of what she has committed and must now endure.According to Heidegger, in the situation of a Dasein constantly fallen and lost in the “On”, who always thinks as the average person thinks, the reconquest of an “authentic being power” maps out the path to freedom. Wherever man/woman exists, there is always a gap (regression), felt between him/her and the “All” of the “world”. This conquest, in contrast to the devaluation that is always at work, is not easy, it is even costly, because “it will be the object of a choice that has never yet taken place, a choice in the first person, the choice of the Self”. For Heidegger, paradoxically, this devaluation has “the character of an escape”, an escape (see Being and Time, SZ p. 184) which can only mean an escape from oneself, consequently the reverse movement will not be that of an idyllic return to the place of a lost plenitude but something else, “the conquest of a difficult freedom compromised in the On”. A long quest for the wholeness of the Dasein. As a result, in Being and Time, the privileged tonality of this road travelled backwards can only be transient with anguish.
In contrast to Descartes, who also spoke of the need to free oneself from the errors and misconceptions that hinder the natural light of reason, Heidegger considers that given the “locking” of “being there”, fallen into the worldly whirlwind, the latter is unable to extract himself/herself from it (by his/her own will alone), and thus to fulfil the conditions of his/her own freedom of choice. In Heidegger’s case, the extraction of the hold of the “One” will require, in order to break this hold, the appeal to something that can play the role played by the divine, especially in Luther’s case, something extreme, almost eschatological for the human being, over which man has no control, and which can only be for him “death and his advance”. Heidegger’s work is not a matter for the human being. Over and above all the moral interpretations that Heidegger challenges, the recovery of its own possibility implies beforehand for the Dasein to become free for the call, that is to say, to “want to have consciousness “. Heidegger considers that the freedom to “choose” is synonymous with the notion of “being in debt “24,N 10.What belongs to it in its own right (what in the self is properly itself), what is aimed at, does not have the meaning of a content to be fulfilled, but of a way of living the world, Die Weise, a way that would have been lost in the devaluation of things, in the world.
In this so remarkable work by the artist-philosopher John Gorman, we thus find both a rereading of the history of art, its themes and the forms it can observe, but also an interpretation of many philosophers (and we should of course start with Aristotle). Who, when and how did one reach such heights?

Delphine Costedoat

“Paphos paints her Galatea”

Paphos paints her Galatea. Black chalk, sanguine pencil, tan pulp paper
In a lair belonging to an indeterminate but extremely dark age, Paphos’ skin radiates a dazzling white light (I am still thinking of The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca), the splendid figure of the creator, seated on an indeterminate support, and dressed in what look like fishnet and garter stockings, with bracelets adorning her right arm, turns her delicate little head, in a graceful posture, towards her creature, Galatea. This one, to the left of the composition, is extremely disturbing for the witness. Before her eyes become accustomed to the semi-darkness into which she is plunged, and discover that she is standing three-quarters of the way up, her right leg bent and her right arm dangling, this witness may indeed believe he is confronted with a figure gutted from the waist down, like a slaughterhouse piece painted by Chardin. But this is just one more lure into which the artist’s drawing, so complex in its grandeur and simplicity, leads us. A pretty woman à la Manet, therefore, holding her brush in front of a very large frame, and an unfinished but beloved monster, whose skin is kneaded in clay and perhaps still wet although it also seems mummified. A creature out of an infernal and hesitant imagination, the largest frame embracing the whole scene composing her like a wild hair dragging almost to her feet. A sort of Negro or Assyrian totem pole, or even an archaic kora, although the movement she sketches with her legs is more or less akin to the classicism of Ancient Greece. In this drawing, which we find it hard not to call painting, the only artist of the 21st century finds it hard to hide his erudition, his boundless imagination, as well as the incredible brilliance of his talent. Transforming the heroine of an ancient myth into a 19th century Parisian coquette, adding to her, without any hiatus in the composition, a primitive companion in the style of Gauguin or Picasso, but reread according to his own style, he takes us on an infinite journey through the centuries and the history of art, and leaves us haggard, speechless, totally confused…

Delphine Costedoat

“Seated woman”

Seated woman. 20x20cm, charcoal
The composition shows a seated naked woman, her legs crossed in a dynamic movement, her two arms spread apart and joined together by her hands, confused, as if in prayer. Her tilted head, crowned by a high bun from which a few locks of hair escape, reveals fine and delicate features, a pointed chin, and evokes, as often do the faces drawn by John Gorman, that of the women in the silent films of the 1920s. Her breasts are generous but without excess, the left breast being as if crushed and split by a large scar or open wound. Behind her, like a wink to Matisse, a sort of tapestry and screen, defined only by a few lines, a few zigzags, and perhaps the beginning of an empty painting or mirror in the upper left corner. It is therefore an interior scene in the manner of a Manet, a Degas, a Cézanne, a Matisse or a Picasso, but here the pictorial treatment intervenes, which distances this scene considerably from these models. Indeed, this seated woman, perhaps praying, is defined by a series of lines, sometimes fluid, sometimes broken and chopped, sometimes like forearms and hands, dissipating into a bundle of features so fine and inextricable that only the viewer’s informed gaze can identify them as such. Here and there, sinuous traces appear, as if the pale skin had been lacerated by a whip, scars are everywhere, and a thick line of deep black runs across his abdomen to resurface through his left knee. The legs themselves are not really defined, a few furtive, interrupted lines merely indicating them. Note that the zigzags and other signs running through the background merge with the woman’s body, which they gain, as if to deny any dichotomy between an exterior that would be the room, and an interior that would be the female nude. Beautiful and bruised, recollected and seemingly impervious to the arrows that crack her body, the seated woman remains impenetrable in her mystery, her acceptance of pain, that only her hands united in prayer seem capable of saving her from an inner hell that the external elements and signs clearly indicate to us. In this, she joins the great heroines of Greek tragedy, much more than the coquettes, ballerinas, bathers or bourgeois women of the references already mentioned.

Delphine Costedoat

“Jocasta, Oedipus”

Jocasta, Oedipus. 100x70cm, red chalk, a few words added

This very large drawing presents itself to the art historian as an enigma that he must try to decipher. We can see here, helped by the title of the work, inscribed at the bottom of the composition, Jocasta and her husband and son Oedipus. Jocasta’s face, tilted, shows juvenile and fine features, although her eyes are masked by the cascade of hair that also partially covers her shoulders. Her breasts are drawn like two still lifes brought back, in the manner of the sculpted female figures adorning the curved pediments under the statues of Lorenzo and Giuliano in the Medici Chapel, due of course to Michelangelo. Like two circles with pronounced but deformed contours, they also seem to be constrained by the enormous curled fetal shape that the woman’s gigantic and sinuous left arm, as well as her single thigh and leg, hold tightly together. This form, again thanks to the title, would thus be Oedipus, returned to his only true identity, before fate and the gods interfered, that of the foetus that he was, protected and sheltered from his mother’s womb, of which he would be represented here as extruded, semi-living and semi-finished or semi-dead. But this enormous protuberance supported at arm’s length by Jocasta operates such an extreme and extraordinary fusion with the body that it is difficult to see there only a being in gestation. It seems that John Gorman is playing on the myth and tragedy of Sophocles by metamorphosing the body of Oedipus into a fetus on an adult scale, taking possession of its mother/wife as much as she takes care of him. There is nothing human, however, in this flabby form, the red colour of the flesh, that of blood, hugs the soft and indeterminate contours. It is a haunted work and a terrifying vision of both motherhood and his own hauntings and myth that the artist delivers us there, playing on his incredible ability to transform the legible into the unreadable, the literal into the untranslatable, the work of art into a writing with indecipherable graphics… If Cubism has of course gone through it, it is out of place, and if the cryptic form in the upper right is the masked head of Oedipus, hidden under his hair and confused with the background reduced to a frame made of dense blood-red streaks, this is only an interpretation by the art historian. In the absence of any model in art history, our representations of the myth are limited to showing Oedipus the King, Oedipus and the Sphinx, Oedipus and Antigone, but largely neglecting the duo Jocasta/ Oedipus. We can find resonances of this haunting theme in John Gorman’s work, but only in his work. And this theme that haunts him in turn haunts us by its immemorial character, the astonishing dexterity with which the artist takes possession of such a large format, his boundless inventiveness, and the fool’s game he plays with the viewer. In conclusion, I would add that it is impossible not to think of this work as a Pietà, a Pietà Rondanini, the product of the most ancient myths, of biblical history, and the fruit of the most intense contemporaneity.

Delphine Costedoat

“Deposition”

Deposition, 25x20cm, graphite on Khadi paper

This work of art by John Gorman shows, as the title suggests, a Deposition. We know from the details provided by the artist that Christ, His mother, and Mary Magdalene are depicted here. We also know that the Christ was inspired by one of Michelangelo’s Christs. For me, the closest model to this drawing is the Rondanini Pietà (1564), although Mary Magdalene is absent from the latter work. Indeed, the position of Christ, as far as we can see, as well as the expression on His face, are very close to this work by the Master. The Virgin is also positioned so close to her son, with her head above his, that this hypothesis would be confirmed. Mary Magdalene adds another character to the scene, which becomes a pyramidal composition, culminating in the imperceptible face of the Virgin, the face of Christ being the only one discernible, as well as His body. It should be noted that the line of His legs follows an opposite direction to that of Michelangelo’s Christ, as far as we can tell. The face of the Son of God is both terrifying and extremely moving. It is the face of Death, its mask, and we can make out hollowed out eye sockets, a nose of which only the bridge remains, a half-open mouth (or, on the contrary, with thick, tight lips? ), His torso partly left empty of pigment (we can see His navel), or covered everywhere with a dense network of tangled oblique lines, unfathomable thicknesses of graphite, as if, instead of being taken down from His Cross, He was already covered with the shroud of death. It thus differs from Michelangelo’s entirely naked work, although the latter’s truncated arms and His torso covered with a network of chisel strokes, which are equally dense, bring it closer. As for the Virgin, apart from the position already mentioned, she is treated in a style characteristic of John Gorman, and his play on veiling and unveiling, themes addressed in philosophy in particular and eminently by Heidegger. We can also mention here Jacques Derrida and particularly his Memoirs of the Blind, to which I will return.
In John Gorman’s drawing, the Virgin is wrapped around the body of her Son. She draws a loop, which arabesque lines allow us to guess, and we can mentally restore and see by looking very carefully at the shape of her buttocks, her contoured back because two small breasts can be discerned, her right shoulder, and therefore her head, while her right leg encroaches on those of her son, merging with them, her bent knee partially masking His body.She is plastically treated with a network of lines, more or less fine or thick, and whose network is more or less dense. At the level of Christ’s navel, which is linked to His mother, a nebulous spot appears, a supernatural element, which reinforces the bond that unites them, fusional but complex. It is as if God the Father intervened here to deny this fusion, which He would disapprove of.On the left, Mary Magdalene, whom John Gorman often approaches as Nikos Kazantzakis does in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, shows only fragments of her flesh left white, the colour of paper, a small mocking puppet’s head perhaps appearing, as if detached from her body. It is located almost exactly at the level of Christ, just a little lower. Apart from these fragments, nothing can be seen of her except her nudity. Graphic elements appear everywhere in the composition: a semblance of a frame on the right, large shreds of material flowing from top to bottom, and thick traces of graphite at the feet of the Virgin and Christ. The body of the Virgin is as if whipped by large, dense ribbons of black pigment. Finally, in the upper left-hand corner, the beginnings of a deep black structure can be seen, which has yet to be interpreted.
It is difficult to compare the graphic or pictorial treatment of this scene with a specific artistic movement or master other than Michelangelo. More terrible than Guernica and Goya’s black paintings, it escapes completely from the manner of these masters. For me, it is more an interpretation of medieval works, from the 12th or 13th centuries. But the dexterity of which it testifies of course also brings it closer to the movements of the second half of the 20th century, and to painters such as Beuys or even the young Pollock for example. But here again, it confronts the works of the latter and reveals an entirely new style, albeit one that is nourished by references. As is always the case in John Gorman’s work. Its beauty, its sublime character, brings it closer to Romanticism, but of course its style distances it from it because it is too new and, in the absence of a term for this new art, which we have already described as discursive and as a new form of writing, I will conclude quoting Jacques Derrida in his aforementioned work:
”What happens when one writes without seeing? A hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight. It is as if a lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers, as if one eye too many had just grown right next to the nail, a single eye, the eye of a cyclops or one-eyed man. This eye guides the tracing or outline [trace}, it is a miner’s lamp at the point of writing, a curious and vigilant substitute, the prosthesis of a seer who is himself invisible. The image of the movement of these letters, of what this finger-eye inscribes, is thus sketched out within me. From the absolute withdrawal of an invisible center or command post, a secret power ensures from a distance a kind of synergy. It coordinates the possibilities of seeing, touching, and moving. And of hearing and understanding, for these are already words of the blind that I draw in this way. One must always remember that the word, the vocable, is heard and understood, the sonorous phenomenon remaining invisible as such. Taking up time rather than space in us, it is addressed not only from the blind to the blind, like a code for the nonseeing, but speaks to us, in truth, all the time of the blindness that constitutes it. Language is spoken, it speaks to itself, which is to say, from/of blindness. It always speaks to us from/of the blindness that constitutes it. But when, in addition, I write without seeing, during those exceptional experiences I just mentioned, in the night or with my eyes glued elsewhere, a schema already comes to life in my memory. At once virtual, potential, and dynamic, this graphic crosses all the borders separating the senses, its being-in-potential at once visual and auditory, motile and tactile. Later, its form will come to light like a developed photograph. But for now, at this very moment when I write, I see literally nothing of these letters. As rare and theatrical as these experiences may be I called them “accidental” they nonetheless impose themselves as an exemplary mise en scène. The extraordinary brings us back to the ordinary and the everyday, back to the experience of the day itself, to what always guides writing through the night, farther or no farther [plus loin] than the seeable or the foreseeable. “Plus loin” can here mean either excess or lack. (No) more knowledge [savoir], (no) more power [pouvoir} writing gives itself over rather to anticipation. To anticipate is to take the initiative, to be out in front, to take (capere) in advance (ante). Different than precipitation, which exposes the head (prae-caput), the head first and ahead of the rest, anticipation would have to do with the hand. The theme of the drawings of the blind is, before all else, the hand. For the hand ventures forth, it precipitates, rushes ahead, certainly, but this time in place of the head, as if to precede, prepare, and protect it. A safeguard, a guardrail. Anticipation guards against precipitation, it makes advances, puts the moves on space in order to be the first to take, in order to be forward in the movement of taking hold, making contact, or apprehending.’’
This seems to me to correspond in almost every aspect to the work of John Gorman.

Delphine Costedoat

“Stripping of Christ”

Stripping of Christ. 30x30cm, black chalk, cotton paper

”We adore Thee O Christ, and we praise Thee – Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world.” (The Testament of St. Francis of Assisi, 1182-1226). In this drawing, John Gorman combines a very structural way of representing this heartbreaking scene with an uncanny evanescence. One can’t help but think of Cézanne’s feeling for the ”architecture” which underlies nature and with his statement that ”everything in nature is based on the sphere, cone, and cylinder”. John Gorman’s work also suggests that art is neither an imitation nor an illusion of reality, but, in fact, a new kind of reality, created through the means of a new language of forms, as Michelangelo and the Cubists have explored in their times, but now renewed. Thus the aim of drawing is not to pretend that the spectator is looking through a window, but to make him/her aware of the picture surface itself as well as the subject matter it depicts. Here, John Gorman seems to join Archaic Greek sculpture, inspired by the monumental stone sculpture of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and carved in stone. Free-standing figures share the solidity and frontal stance characteristic of Eastern model, but their forms are more dynamic than those of Egyptian sculpture, which is precisely one can observe in John Gorman’s drawing. Let’s mention for example ”The Lady of Auxerre” and the ”Torso of Hera” (Early Archaic period, 660-580 BC, both in the Louvre). Christ, in John Gorman’s drawing, recalls a kouro, and emphasises the essential features of human anatomy. This artwork makes one think also of sepulchral or votive statues, like ”Apollo” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), an early work; the ”Strangford Apollo from Anafi” (British Museum), a much later work; and the ”Anavyssos Kouros” (National Archaeological Museum of Athens). More of the musculature and skeletal structure is visible in this statue than in earlier works, which allows to establish parallelisms between this artwork and John Gorman’s one. However, the frustoconical shape of Christ, here, the absence of any head, like in so many Rodin’s drawings, the strokes like filaments whose conclude the indiscernible lower body and arms, a deliberate ”blur”, depart this work from any copying of any past model. In Memoirs of the Blind (1990), Jacques Derrida quotes Baudelaire on this subject: ”I refer to Monsieur G’s method of draftsmanship. He draws from memory and not from the model… All good and true draftsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains, and not from nature. To the objection that there are admirable sketches of the latter type by Raphael, Watteau, and many others, I would reply that these are notes – very scrupulous notes, none the less. When a true artist has come to the point of the final exception of his work, the model would be more of an embarrassment than a help to him.” Derrida adds that ”Baudelaire, it is true, interprets memory as a natural reserve, without history, tragedy, or event, as, in his words, the naturally sacrificial matrix of a visible order that is selected, chosen, filtered. It breaks with the present of visual perception only in order to keep a better eye on drawing. Creative memory, schematization, the time and schema of Kant’s transcendental imagination, with its ”synthesis” and its ”ghosts”. These words from the French poet and the French philosopher seem to have been written to depict John Gorman’s work. I shall only mention another point which seems to me essential, and characterises the draughtsman’s production. Denis Coutagne, President of the Paul Cézanne Society in Aix-en-Provence, emphasises the fact that no matter how tiny Cézanne’s drawings are, they always have a monumentality to them. John Gorman is absolutely unique, his drawings impenetrable and impossible to classify or mistake for those of any master of the past.

Delphine Costedoat

“Ajax”

Ajax, blue chalk, graphite on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“Athena considers Galatea and Pygmalion”

Athena considers Galatea and Pygmalion, graphite, chalk on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“Salome and maid bathe”

Salome and maid bathe, chalk on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“David lifts Bathsheba’s veils”

David lifts Bathsheba’s veils, graphite, chalk on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“Minotaur”

Minotaur, French paper, graphite. 120x90cm

“Salomé, the invention”

Salomé, the invention. 120x99cm, sanguine, chalk on paper

“Tragoidas (after R.B. Kitaj, 1958)”

Tragoidas (after R.B. Kitaj, 1958, Green Blanket)

Graphite, chalk on Kadi paper, 50x35cm

“Frenhofer's studio as gates of hell”

Frenhofer's studio as gates of hell, black and grey chalks, 90x60cm

This masterpiece shows Frenhofer contemplating, like an Ecce homo as he wears an aura, the tragedy of his many attempts to draw perfectly his loved model Gillette. The accumulation of the paintings makes think of what the past masters did, filling their works with a lot of still lives, other paintings, figures as voyeurs (Courbet's studio). Here are Picasso, Michelangelo, the great Spaniards, Italians, Dutch… The splendour of this drawing is made of a close juxtaposition of paintings of the loved model. Line is so thick, background so dark, the juxtaposition so incredible… The composition is prodigious. Rembrandt's counter-beauty is revisited in the centre panel. He is also present in the darkness, while Velasquez is here in the proliferation of paintings like mirrors to each others. Rodin's world and work are omnipresent. The ancient Greeks, Hebrews, until Delacroix, Caravaggio, are present. This drawing is THE Unknown masterpiece of the 21st century. ''The eye doesn't enjoy boundaries… hence the eye is ethical… shows shame, violence…I think also of species… a new aesthetic'' (John Gorman)

Delphine Costedoat

“Athena,”

Athena, graphite, blue chalk on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“Galatea paints Spinario and Siren”

Galatea paints Spinario and Siren, charcoal, chalk on Khadi paper, 30x30cm

“The Model draws the Minotaur”

The Model draws the Minotaur, ink on paper, 30x30cm

“Salomé mourns the Baptist”

Salomé mourns the Baptist. Pencil. Khadi paper.30x30cm

This absolutely stunning drawing shows Salome curled up on the floor, or as if dragging herself across it, leaning on her one visible hand. The rest of her body, majestically encamped, is made of gentle waves as if it were calm water, contrasting with the drama she is experiencing. Her very long hair drags itself across the floor and largely masks her face, whose features are difficult to discern. Entirely covered with veils, light, her beautiful and generous forms give a hint of her youth. The pencil flats, densely applied on the left, gradually fade on the right towards the lower part of her body and her feet, giving way to a bundle of lines so tenuous that they seem to be made up of a different pigment. The powerful line determining the back, the curvature of the buttocks, the bent knees and the start of the legs, is striking. At the far right of the composition, what could be a cast shadow – but from which light source? – composes a ghostly double to the dancer-murderer of her lover.The second part of the composition, in the upper part of the drawing, shows the Baptist lying down on the ground, feet and hands shackled, his head buried in the hollow of his arms. Other chains seem to encircle his torso. His muscular limbs, constrained to the most severe immobility, indicate that in his mourning, Salome relives his last moments, those leading up to his death, the nakedness of the saint giving his funeral reveries a powerfully erotic, albeit morbid, character. The lines here too are powerful, though less precisely drawn than those that define the young woman’s body. They tremble, undulate, under the jolts of this body trying in vain to espe its disastrous destiny. A series of horizontal lines sketch the straw mattress on which he was thrown into his dungeon.The absence of light or luminous shades, the wide gap between the two figures, make this composition unreal. Although this drawing may refer to the multiple studies on the same sheet of paper by the great masters, it is indeed one and the same composition. And it is on this point that it acquires so much interest and novelty.The references here are of course numerous: for the Baptist, one thinks of the male nudes of David, of Géricault, of all the Renaissance masters nourished by the culture of Ancient Greece…For Salomé, Delacroix, Degas, painters who have moved from chiaroscuro and miserable women (for example from Northern Europe) can also be summoned.It is a sublime work in the romantic sense of the term that we are dealing with, although it opens the way to a new apprehension of space, volume, the touch rendered only with a pencil, a remarkable work, a new stage in the artist’s career.

Delphine Costedoat

“Nessus and Deianira”

Nessus and Deianira, graphite, 30x30cm

What ardour and fervour in this drawing in which the centaur Nessus seizes Dejanira in an impulse comparable to the beautiful Hercules kills Nessus, by Sebastiano Ricci, 1706-1707 (fresco in Palazzo Fenzi-Marucelli, Florence)! But here, the classicism of the Italian master is overtaken by the formal gigantism of the centaur, his monstrously developed and deformed body, untranslatable, as it is now “de rigueur” in the new classicism invented by John Gorman. With his extremely vigorous right arm, he seizes Déjanira’s two arms and drags her along, without her really showing any disagreement. The passivity of Hercules’ wife seems to prelude the grief that will cause her death and that of her husband, after that of the centaur… In this drawing, everything is line, everything is masterfully orchestrated composition, everything is rhythm and everything is music, everything is writing and signs, everything is writing and harsh contrasts, although tenderness is not excluded, by the consent of the woman. It is an erotic scene, of course, but there is nothing phonographic about it, and it is far from the frenzied embraces of centaurs painted by Picasso. Everything here moves away from Picasso, and joins the old masters, their myths, their visions to which they did not dare or could not give form, everything here is speed, velocity, everything here is admirable of finds, sources of infinite discoveries. And in this chiaroscuro of another age, this is indeed our present time, for a work which, added to others recently produced by John Gorman, is destined for posterity.

Delphine Costedoat

“Europa lies upon the less favoured”

Europa lies upon the less favoured, 25x20cm. Black pencil, chalk

“Salomé, the Baptist, a predella study”

Salomé, the Baptist, a predella study. Graphite. Oil red pastel. Pulp paper. 30x30cm

Only the title can allow the viewer to guess the presence of the Baptist in this work where the kneeling figure of Salome, of great beauty, extends his left arm towards what seems to be a ghostly silhouette trying to merge with it. The young woman’s body is perfectly defined by the perfect lines of graphite and oil pastel that follow her forms. Only her head, as usual in the artist’s work, is invisible, at least the features of her face, lost in a mist of brown and deep red pigment that permeates the entire composition. The Baptist’s left arm and hand, ready to grasp his lover, and a part of his long body and hair can be guessed from him. The monochromy of rigour in the last works of the draughtsman gives way here to a two-tone work, of dust and mixed blood. The lines are of great variety, as is the artist’s new style, drawing like a veil, a fishnet, on Salome’s body, scratching the Baptist’s body with bloody scars. The two borders of the predella are made up of wooden pillars painted the same blood red, the weft of the support remaining in fragments perceptible. The fact that the artist tells us that this is a study for a predella is extremely important and interesting. In fact, he is referring to medieval art, an idea that is, however, undermined by the exquisite classicism of the figure of Salome, which takes us back to the nineteenth century and the works of Delacroix, Degas and, beyond these masters, those of the Renaissance and also of the seventeenth century – let us think in particular of Poussin, a master of drawing. However, this accomplished classicism is in turn reread in the light of older masters because of the deliberate archaism that the artist uses to compose his work and add his pictorial touch. The pigment here is either light and discreet or densely applied, in a falsely hesitant manner, as on the borders, the base, but also the runners that melt into the two silhouettes. If cubism is present here, it is in the form of a hidden memory to be determined by the eye of the informed viewer. We are here in a pre- and post-history of the avant-gardes, and ”Thus is the experience of territory. And of sexual territory. And of return. And of ‘homeland’ ”, as Derrida masterfully writes in her work Geschlecht III. Session 13.

Delphine Costedoat

“Dionysos binds Jocasta”

Dionysos binds Jocasta, Charcoal, 20x20cm

The composition shows Jocasta, naked, crouching, her face half turned backwards, and Dionysos, as the title of the work indicates, busy blinding her. While the female figure remains legible, although the contours of her body are simply outlined, the figure of the god is more elliptical. His stature does not appear impressive, and his face has a clown-like appearance. Seen from the side, without being able to discern the movement of his arms and hands, he is busy binding Jocasta, as said, as a mass of spiralling and whirling lines at the top of the latter’s head would seem to indicate, while fragmentary frame sketches appear on the left, right and even in the centre, between the two figures, via a vertical line doubled by a very hard horizontal line, which pierce the god’s face and then abruptly interrupt. The rest of the composition consists of non-figurative zigzags, but emphasising the frenetic movement represented here. As the myth relates, Jocasta hanged herself while learning the truth about her husband and son Oedipus. Here the 21st-century artist postulates that Dionysos helped her in this. Was she not deigned to join his worshippers because of her sin and her life of debauchery, which had taken place without her knowledge? But the gods, as is well known, knew the truth, so it is not surprising that this unique scene in the history of art appeared in the mind and under the hand of John Gorman. In Homer’s Odyssey (hymn 11), when he descends into the Underworld, Ulysses sees the mother of Oedipus (here called Epicastus). We can think that here the artist has represented the scene before Jocasta’s descent into the Underworld, who is therefore helped by another god. The space-time in which the scene is played out is therefore perfectly orchestrated. On the other hand, this work bears witness, plastically speaking, to John Gorman’s return to classicism in his most recent drawings. However, I will speak of a certain return to classicism, a classicism here perhaps borrowed from Poussin, but reread by Cézanne and perhaps also certain drawings by Picasso. However, this return to classicism in the 21st century is not pure imitation: here we celebrate the marriage of the great style, of its avatars, of the avant-gardes of the early 20th century, but also the alliance with a new way of representing this concept, as old as the Greek myths. The fabulous line, brutal, hard and thick, or softer and undulating, or muffled, like the hatching that runs through the naked skin of the god, similar in this way to that of a faun, gives a new meaning to this concept, and gives it new life. John Gorman’s drawing belongs to a style that has always belonged only to him. And in this, the exercise is more than successful. If my memory does not fail me, this scene in which Dionysos binds Jocasta does not appear either in Sophocles’ The King Oedipus or in Sophocles’ The Oedipus in Colonus: The title thus immediately indicates that John Gorman, once again, departs from the mimesis, and, as described by Jean Beaufret in his Dialogues with Heidegger, he withdraws to reveal “the existence of intelligible realities”, then, responding to Heidegger’s assertions about aletheia, he uses his own magical-religious wor[l]d to transcend it; it is not the manifestation of a will. Note that for the ancient Greeks, the “Word [World] of Truth” is also a word [work, here] of justice, a word [I add work] that brings into play memory, trust, the faculty of persuasion and ultimate adherence. But, as Heidegger also points out, the ancient Greeks did not know the clear-cut opposition between truth and falsehood, other pairs of opposites disrupt this pattern, “memory/forgetfulness”, “effective/non-effective”, “just/unjust”, “trust/deception”, “persuasion/inaudible”. This interpretation of the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta, the latter’s own story, so unheard of in the tragedies of Sophocles, is for me both anamnesis and aletheia, which, according to the Pseudo-Platon’s Definitions, is the “disposition that allows affirmation and negation”.

Delphine Costedoat

“Theodora”

Theodora, charcoal, white conté pencil on paper, 36x26cm

The story of Theodora, her staging with her maids, eunuchs, ornaments, poses, was not chosen at random by John Gorman. The East, the mythical Orient, has been the object of fantasy for all artists - and few have actually been there - for many centuries, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this fantastical East, they projected their own desires that were forbidden in the Western world, and over time they copied each other, drawing their inspiration from the engravings, drawings, paintings that the artists accompanying the kings and emperors had brought back from their travels. John Gorman, in the 21st century, seems to be taking over this tradition, and yet! How many mistakes an art historian can make in sticking to the letter and not to the spirit, fascinated as he/she is by his erotic scenes leading to the apogee of pornography, such as Picasso in his old age did not even dare to produce! Undeniably, John Gorman plays with references, too, but it would be wrong to look for them all on the side of the East and its representations. It would be just as wrong to think that any fascination with Ingres etc. led him to these distant lands and to this distant past. The 'impossible memory', as he keeps repeating, makes any reference suspicious, any model possibly erroneous for those who seek it. Of course, choosing this mysterious empress, because of her past and her dubious morals, allows him to give birth to scenes that are both fascinating and disturbing, and to give free rein to his passion for the naked female body. I do not see, for my part, real "models" for her works, although one can say that they are innumerable. We are groping along, revelation after revelation, but isn't the meaning of this series and its outcome precisely to undermine the referential system, and to lead us elsewhere - ‘’d’ailleurs - , where imagination, inventiveness, an immense culture that would become obsolete, would supplant the desire to follow a tradition? In this work in progress, well, anything seems possible...

Delphine Costedoat

“Theodora”

Theodora. Sanguine. Tinted paper, 30x25cm