by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Salome mourns

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Salome mourns. Charcoal. Khadi paper, 30x30cm The poignant figure of Salome alone occupies the composition. An unfinished sketch of the frame leaves her in the completely empty and vast space where she is recluse, with no possible escape. Lost in space and time, her being is broken without remission. Is there still a possible and formulable thought that would pass through this head hidden by her long hair? Her beautiful naked body, in the image of a nubile Spartan, curls up on itself through a single, masterfully drawn line. If the author evokes a knot to Cubism, this knot is well hidden. For the vehement vigours or the melancholic violence of a Picasso are far removed from this drawing. Just like the famous line, powerful, melodic, a piece by Ravel for left hand played by Wittgenstein. The artist-philosopher’s own bitter melancholy is coiled up there, in this being and its destiny, the sin that no Christ will come to save, for He has not yet come. Or has not yet, by His own death, redeemed the sins of mankind. Salome, responsible for the death of her lover, the one who precisely baptised Christ, responsible for an act of madness intended to celebrate also the power of her own body, sides with the damned visited by Dante and Virgil, with no possible remission, because her crime is too great. John Gorman’s art, which is writing, handwriting, transposed into lines embodying beings, once again reaches heights which, systematically, seem to the viewer to be impassable, and which are each time, and systematically too, still surpassed. Unequalled in his prophetic play on lines, the artist has within him an inner world and a thought so rich, that his art is by inexhaustible dedication, and destined to grow, again and again, both legible and indecipherable, imbued with a mystery that sends him back to the greatest, but, tragically, also always to himself. A hell of its own, which every true creator must accept to be confronted with. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative