by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Salome’s episodes

0.0 x 0.0

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

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative