by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Executioner, John the Baptist, Salomé

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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 One can of course think here of Giacometti’s attempts, but of a Giacometti who would be like an actualised, of course out-of-date, whose work of capturing the essence of Being would finally be completed, and not doomed to the nothingness in which it remains forever.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

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative