by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Stripping of Christ

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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

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative