The monster's gaze: inner thoughts
Monstrous intimacies, monstrous places? Many artists have developed imaginary and unusual forms that can be described as chimerical. At the crossroads of inner and outer worlds, the marvellous combines elements of reality and personal projections. Whether disproportions or invented characters, the figure of the monster is as plural as it is changeable.
Allegory, mythological being, religious representation, intimate companion, the monster can be both frightening and touching, fascinating and repulsive, human and inhuman. Freed today from its primarily religious dimension, the imaginary, deformed creature has never ceased to be a rich source of inspiration for artists. The evocations of horror in the Black Paintings of Goya (1746-1828), or the incarnations of dreams in the canvases of Füssli (1741-1825) are just some of the clothes that the fantastic being can don. Later, the works of Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) orchestrated new dream hybridities between man, animal and legend. These pictorial forms continued to evolve with the work of the Surrealists.
The monster is there, and its motif with it. A new lightness. Its appearance destructures one vision to create another. A look that gives free rein to the meanderings of every inner self. And to certain follies. From his psychiatric hospital room, Eugen Gabritschevsky (1893-1979) created creatures as diverse as they were powerful. An intimacy declined in an infinity of pictorial spaces. Fields created, in a very different way, by Léopold Chauveau (1870-1940) in his Paysages monstrueux and his tales, among others, in the face of a sometimes painful or dramatic reality.
Whether it's a refuge or an opening, the imaginary is an expanse. Of creation and meaning. The monster is man. Without men, their conventions and projections, it would not exist. The monstrous disturbs because it resembles us. At least, in part. An identification possible in similarity as in difference. The monster's gaze invites us straightforwardly to observe the complexities of places where "The more the years go by, the more life seems to be embellished with the hieroglyphs of this wonderful world, with these symbols that make our existence even more dear."[1]
Mahault de Raymond-Cahuzac
[1] Eugen Gabritschevsky (1893-1979), (cat. traveling exp. in Paris, La Maison Rouge, July 8-September 18, 2016; Lausanne, Collection de l'Art Brut, November 11, 2016-February 19, 2017; New York, American Folk Art Museum, March 13-August 13, 2017), Editions Snoeck, Ghent, 2016, p.39.
