by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Dionysos binds Jocasta

0.0 x 0.0

Dionysos binds Jocasta, Charcoal, 20x20cm The composition shows Jocasta, naked, crouching, her face half turned backwards, and Dionysos, as the title of the work indicates, busy blinding her. While the female figure remains legible, although the contours of her body are simply outlined, the figure of the god is more elliptical. His stature does not appear impressive, and his face has a clown-like appearance. Seen from the side, without being able to discern the movement of his arms and hands, he is busy binding Jocasta, as said, as a mass of spiralling and whirling lines at the top of the latter’s head would seem to indicate, while fragmentary frame sketches appear on the left, right and even in the centre, between the two figures, via a vertical line doubled by a very hard horizontal line, which pierce the god’s face and then abruptly interrupt. The rest of the composition consists of non-figurative zigzags, but emphasising the frenetic movement represented here. As the myth relates, Jocasta hanged herself while learning the truth about her husband and son Oedipus. Here the 21st-century artist postulates that Dionysos helped her in this. Was she not deigned to join his worshippers because of her sin and her life of debauchery, which had taken place without her knowledge? But the gods, as is well known, knew the truth, so it is not surprising that this unique scene in the history of art appeared in the mind and under the hand of John Gorman. In Homer’s Odyssey (hymn 11), when he descends into the Underworld, Ulysses sees the mother of Oedipus (here called Epicastus). We can think that here the artist has represented the scene before Jocasta’s descent into the Underworld, who is therefore helped by another god. The space-time in which the scene is played out is therefore perfectly orchestrated. On the other hand, this work bears witness, plastically speaking, to John Gorman’s return to classicism in his most recent drawings. However, I will speak of a certain return to classicism, a classicism here perhaps borrowed from Poussin, but reread by Cézanne and perhaps also certain drawings by Picasso. However, this return to classicism in the 21st century is not pure imitation: here we celebrate the marriage of the great style, of its avatars, of the avant-gardes of the early 20th century, but also the alliance with a new way of representing this concept, as old as the Greek myths. The fabulous line, brutal, hard and thick, or softer and undulating, or muffled, like the hatching that runs through the naked skin of the god, similar in this way to that of a faun, gives a new meaning to this concept, and gives it new life. John Gorman’s drawing belongs to a style that has always belonged only to him. And in this, the exercise is more than successful. If my memory does not fail me, this scene in which Dionysos binds Jocasta does not appear either in Sophocles’ The King Oedipus or in Sophocles’ The Oedipus in Colonus: The title thus immediately indicates that John Gorman, once again, departs from the mimesis, and, as described by Jean Beaufret in his Dialogues with Heidegger, he withdraws to reveal “the existence of intelligible realities”, then, responding to Heidegger’s assertions about aletheia, he uses his own magical-religious wor[l]d to transcend it; it is not the manifestation of a will. Note that for the ancient Greeks, the “Word [World] of Truth” is also a word [work, here] of justice, a word [I add work] that brings into play memory, trust, the faculty of persuasion and ultimate adherence. But, as Heidegger also points out, the ancient Greeks did not know the clear-cut opposition between truth and falsehood, other pairs of opposites disrupt this pattern, “memory/forgetfulness”, “effective/non-effective”, “just/unjust”, “trust/deception”, “persuasion/inaudible”. This interpretation of the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta, the latter’s own story, so unheard of in the tragedies of Sophocles, is for me both anamnesis and aletheia, which, according to the Pseudo-Platon’s Definitions, is the “disposition that allows affirmation and negation”. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative