by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Europa

0.0 x 0.0

Europa, 20x20cm, pencil and chalk on paper The composition shows the broad figure of Europa, which occupies the centre, with her voluptuous hips and thighs revealing her sex, her thighs as if covered with fishnet stockings, her slender waist and small breasts, then, as if lifted from the trunk, her head seen from three-quarters, eyes closed, mouth open, and the start of her left arm and hand hanging down. To his right, an avatar of Zeus is represented, transformed according to the myth into a white bull, in order to approach her without frightening her and escape the jealousy of his wife Hera, on a beach in Sidon (now Lebanon). Let us note immediatly that, contrary to Picasso, the said bull is only represented here by a vaguely anthropomorphic head drowned in a flow of red pigment, only two small pin-headed eyes being perceptible. This head, half human, half monstrous, seems to rest on Europa’s right shoulder blade, while the body tries to wrap itself behind and around that of the princess via a non-figurative curvilinear shape and a series of vigorous red lines that express the ardour of its assault. The colour red is found to the right of the composition, in the form of a simulated frame and/or landscape, as well as to represent the young woman’s nipples and her sex. The pseudo red frame is also used to close the scene, at the height of Europa’s right knee, in the form of a horizontal line which the latter overflows. A bright white colour marks this drawing, probably inspired by the southern light, but the use of blood red puts an end to any harmony between the two protagonists, although it may also indicate the ardour of the sun. When contemplating the iconic face of Europa, one cannot help but imagine her wearing a Phrygian cap, and evoke the equally iconic figure used by Delacroix to represent Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi, one of his masterpieces, and, of course, his Liberty leading the people. John Gorman’s game of veiling and unveiling is thus extremely subtle. First of all, with regard to the figure of Europa, the cow “with a wide gaze” that unites with the “bull” Zeus, the designator of the earth “where the gaze is on the far side” comes from the same root eurús, “wide” and ὤψ / ṓps, “eye, sight”. The “broad-looking” earth is an old epithet of the earth that can be found in several Indo-European traditions: “the broad earth” in Greek, “the broad earth” or simply “the broad” in Sanskrit, and similarly in Germanic languages. This leads us to Heidegger in particular, which strives to make us think together in veiling and unveiling. He uses the German translation, which allows him to interpret the “hiding” of the Heraklian sentence as a “hiding place” as well as a “shelter”; the Phusis, according to the thinker, would like to “shelter” because, in the shelter of the veil, concealment, occultation, are for it the guarantee of “emergence” and “hatching”.Meditating on this co-appropriation between “blossoming” and “occultation” is not a dialectical game, nor a simple apposition of opposites; but, as Heidegger points out, it is a dynamic that forces us to think of occultation and non-being as an essential part of the Phusis (night of day, the war of peace, the scarcity of abundance), which alone guarantees it to be what it is. In this original thought, non-being is constitutive of being, and this is what is thought in the enigmatic Heraclitus sentence, as well as in the status of saying and speech in archaic times.Even more enigmatic is Heidegger’s insistence on presenting the aletheia, not only as needing the occultation to shine (day needs night) what it would be if it were a mere opening, but “as the unveiling of the occultation itself”. The metaphor of light has been banal since Plato, to designate the condition of the possibility of “appearing” it, Heidegger also uses it in this sense, but he notes that this clarity, this free radiation, requires a dimension, a land where it can spread its radiance and where everything can appear. The enlightenment, die Lichtung, is therefore much more the opening that this clarity presupposes, it says not only what is revealed and this very unveiling, but also that other which is not revealed and which remains hidden. The alétheia is thought of as an unveiling of the being and not as a concordance. It turns out that the being can only be unveiled because of a dimension that does not reveal itself. What is essential and enigmatic in John Gorman’s drawing is that the various occultations (the face and body of Zeus, the closed eyes of Europa) conceal themselves. Appearing in all the brightness of the dazzling light, and in all its unity, the princess veils herself and disappears in the same movement, while the god, clearly showing his monstrosity of an anthropomorphic larva, operates in the same way. We return here to the ulterior quest for a sexuality which, approached more deeply than Heidegger’s, “establishes a kind of negotiation and compromise” that “is constantly in progress” and “obliges us to recast Heidegger’s implicit logic”. ”To say that there is divisibility is not the same as saying that there is only divisibility or division (that would also be death). Death [here blood red] lies in wait on both sides, on the side of the fantasy of the integrity of the proper place and the innocence of sexual difference without war, and on the opposite side, that of radical impropriety or expropriation, or even of a Geschlecht war as sexual dissension”. (Derrida, Geschlecht III, ed. du Seuil, 2018).John Gorman, without denying them, takes us here very far (although some kinship is conceivable) from both the terracotta and statuettes of classical Greece and the Abduction of Europa by Titian (1559-1562), from the same scene reinterpreted by Rubens, Giambattista Tiepolo (1730) or Stefano Ricci (1720). The scope of his work and the ardent thought from which it is the fruit, but also plastically, surpasses the avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th century, and takes us towards an infinite world (as was Europe), both formally and philosophically speaking. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative