by John Gorman

Artwork Description

After Botticelli's Mars and Venus

0.0 x 0.0

Black pencil, chalk on paper. 40x30cm Here, John Gorman gives an interpretation of Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, a panel tempera made in 1483 and kept at the National Gallery in London. Here the goddess, the putti represented as small fauns with goat legs and horned heads, playing with the weapons and attributes of the sleeping god, are absent. However, Mars is depicted in the same attitude as that in which Botticelli painted him, stretched out all the way with his right leg raised to the bent knee overlapping the left leg. His arms similarly echo in their positions those of the god in the Renaissance work, while his head is tilted more deeply on his left shoulder, and no drapery veils his sex, for here the figure is entirely naked. The background, vaguely painted in the form of an uncertain landscape by Botticelli, is replaced here by a dark lair, made up of a flat black area, but also of blue-green streaks at the bottom of the composition, which may evoke this landscape in an abstract form and in a position that is therefore reversed. The stature of Mars is majestic, and his musculature powerful. However, there is nothing to indicate precisely these elements. It is the viewer’s gaze that completes the figure itself, defined only by John Gorman with a fine, serpentine, fragmented line, extremely masterful. The description does not stop there, however. Indeed, while Venus and the small fauns and props are absent, we note as a duplication of the lines that circumscribe the god’s limbs in the lower part of his body, composing a ghostly double, and indicating that invisible presences are at work here. Such as the fragments of one or more bodies incursion at the top of his bent right leg, bending in turn to draw as a sort of arm or several arms and more indistinct shapes, on the left, so that it is impossible to clearly distinguish the extremity of Mars’ body. Moreover, at the left end of the composition, the hindquarters and leg of a goat are visible. This is where the role of colour comes into play. If, on the right, the face, the torso, the arms, most of the thighs of the god are left colourless, adopting the grain of the paper, on the left, grey-brown chalk patches cover all or part of these invading limbs, like creepers. Now, knowing the work to which John Gorman refers here, how can one not think of the fur of the fauns, which would somehow “contaminate” and take possession of the body of the sleeping god? Moreover, are there not little horns adorning his head, which is tilted and has very human features, but whose right ear seems to follow a pointed line? What can be said, finally, of this very strong line of black graphite which follows the outline of his back, then his legs, and composes a sort of resting place for him, but also splits the drawing at the lowest point of the composition, revealing two unusual rounded shapes, one of which, with a firm line drawn around the eye, seems to be a female face? Or, on the contrary, are these two protuberances an avatar of the breasts of the absent and present Venus at the same time? For what is the god Mars dreaming of if not his lover? Thus, far from being faced with a sleeping male figure, we would be dealing with a drawing with multiple meanings, which would extract from Boticelli’s somewhat bland work its most eloquent elements to transpose them here and transmute them, returning the god to a being of primitive savagery, expelling the goddess but transforming her into a post-Cubist artefact. How far we are from the ethereal prettiness of Girodet’s Endymion’s Sleep and neo-classicism! For example and among many other references! If the drawing is divine, The fact remains that this time it escapes classicism, even that of Echo and Narcissus by the great Poussin! Picasso, who at the end of his life sought inspiration in the great works of the past, focused almost exclusively on female figures. And the fragmentary and as it were ‘’crumbled’’ character of the line, in John Gorman’s drawing, departs from the works of the inventor of Cubism. His inventor? Once again, if it was possible to find a model for the 21st artist, it would be in the Renaissance, like the painting by Botticelli, but rather on the side of Michelangelo. The figure of Twilight, in particular, adorning the broken and curvilinear pediment under the statue of Lorenzo, in the Medici Chapel, imprecise, unfinished, his eyes empty, without pupils or irises, blind, symbolising sleep and oblivion, impotence facing destiny, is not very far, by its position, even if it slides on its support, from that of sleeping Mars, himself blind, therefore. And who, more than the divine Michelangelo, comes closer to the work of John Gorman, both in the treatment of figures, of the background when it comes to painting, and in the passages that it operates across centuries, cultures, myths, and styles? Michelangelo, who certainly smiled at Botticelli’s bland work, would not have given any interpretation, this painting being too close in time to him. But time passes, and the works of John Gorman follow one another, more and more close to the absolute Master, to his ideals, to his own obsessions. His own plastic preoccupations and finds reveal a constant work of his boiling brain, and also and more and more brings us back to the human condition, to his more or less latent animality, from where a work blossoms, more and more firm and amazing in its choices, discoveries, and its dazzling, terrifying dexterity. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative