by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Jocasta, Oedipus

0.0 x 0.0

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

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative