about pain... and hope

“The inner experience of man is given at the moment when, by tearing chrysalis, man is conscious of tearing himself, not the opposite resistance from without. A huge revolution takes place when one is able to overcome the objective consciousness that the walls of chrysalis limited.”
BATAILLE, Georges – O Erotismo, edição ilustrada, Lisboa: Antígona, 1954, p. 34.

Beyond any memory, a sensation comes through instead. First the falling body then the clash. The feeling of a broken body completely scattered. Pain and ecstasy. Memories are layers, repressed to a thin membrane of mnemonic debris. This accumulated and heavy skin dwells between the conscious and the unconscious. The memories are still there, but they have turned into something else: a nonsense figure, a vile monster with the appearance of a wicked man who clings wickedly to his body. My name is Odette and it's one of my heteronyms.
As we look at these paintings, our body initially repels them. Recognizes the pain and anguish in the skin with a viscous and transparent appearance. It is a body that has been cut and pierced. The continuous millennial effort to delimit us offers a sense of agony and discomfort, and perhaps this is where something similar to masochism emerges. The desire to feel the pain that transcends the flesh makes this a scene of terror and agony (eg the work of Gina Pane and Vito Acconci). Suicide, as its extreme, is when the flesh confronts the spirit head on. A dizzying rise in the decline of the soul. In these attacks on the body, so close to death, there is a liberation and a strange eroticism. Interestingly, this is for Bataille the "... Approval of life even in death itself." In this ecstasy, there is no longer outer and inner. It is a light body, full and without organs. The sense of liberation is blue and, perhaps like Klein's monochromatic, empty and complete, near a heavenly mother. The discomfort we feel impels us to that abyss of light and darkness. Light is the reborn body of a new womb. VISGRAAT, with its struggling spine, is a Phoenix (once a centipede Lacraia) in a violent birth. Finally the monster disappears and we feel a gentle breeze and the warmth of an unnamed love.

Text by Emily Ham