Visual Riddles

I take my cock very seriously.
Maybe not yours, that’s why you wouldn’t understand, but mine is linked to my brain. The Brain makes me walk into situations that feed my emotions.
Of course it’s not just the cock that stimulates my brain and imagination. But I can’t (yet?) make sculptures about a poem, about the wind that touches my skin, the breathing of my lover into my ear while he sleeps, as they too speak to me.

Contrary to folklore myths, the cock doesn’t have a brain of its own. It feels like that if you want to blame something on it.

My inspiration roams through the corridors of human nature and when they hit a target, they become visual images in my mind.
My hands try to give an exterior form to that image. I draw, I sculpt them.
From exterior input, sieved through my own being, these ideas, voices, become something visible, tangible. But they themselves refer not to the exterior, superficial image of life. They echo my emotions and thoughts and try to do the same with yours. They’re merely an interface and you should not try to “decode” my works and “understand” me. Communication between us is communication between lives. Whatever my work shows, let it sparkle your personal ideas and emotions.
If I wanted to be decoded, I’d publish a puzzle. My work is a visual riddle: I present you with an image. Scrap away the surface, observe your mental and emotional reaction hanging inside your interior space.

Most of my works depict the male sex organ or men engaged in what apparently (or evidently) is homo-sex or homo-tenderness. It is my natural way of depicting the (possible) relationship between men.
If you look closer and often enough, you’ll start to see that every cock can tell a story, can have a “personality”.
The cock drawings and sculptures I make, speak of that. Don’t let the sight of a cock scare or revolt you. When you hold yours in your hand, it feels natural. Your own saliva feels natural in your mouth, why does someone else’s feel weird?
Is it the social & cultural construction engraved in our minds that tell us how to feel and what to think? Is it the temporary Norm-al taking over the eternal Natural?

I sculpt two men having sex. The attention, if you want to drink the sap of my sculptural fruit, should go to details: the hands, how do they grab, push, cling to? The feet, how to they sustain, how are the toes contortioned? The back curve, what does it speak about?
Ask these question (with your eyes and with your touch, in the case of the statues) and answer them with your ideas, your emotions. Yours, not the Norm’s.

Evolution depends on reproduction. It’s no surprise that when we have more than sufficiently guaranteed for the survival of the human animal, other factors come into play: the reaction to epidemics, to societies, cultures, morals. We, as animals, have these factors to respond to, as we now, mostly have (or could all have) a bread on the table, not die in child birth or because a finger infection.
So what’s to become of the human reproductive organs? They’re (still) vital, but really?…
How often do we masturbate, abort? Not sure this happened when the planet was only populated by few tribes of human apes.
Sexuality is trying to tell us something. Sex is migrating from the basic function of reproduction to various types of pleasures. Fetish, role playing, controlling (others), becoming addicted, getting exhausted, justifying submission or brutality, dyeing because and “thanks” to the sex behavior.
My art works touch on that, can you see behind the forms do you want to receive the riddles?

To help you take the time and play with these ideas and feelings, my sculptural works are small. Some are Celtic-repetitive in design, functioning like a visual mantra that will push you into the endless abyss of meditation.
You need to slow down your frantic mind buzz, grab a small, netsuke-like object in your hand, train observation, feel the weight of a miniature, the texture, how it touches your palm skin.

It’s not a new idea, the Chinese, thousands of years ago, were already making these small visual poems in wood, ivory, bone, jade, other semi-precious stones.
Much later the European monks were carving boxwood balls and using beads, just like Arabs do, to focus their mind on a certain meditation.
Small artistic gems depicting crucifixions have flooded the (Western) world for 1500+ years. Pretty uni-dimensional in subject, if you asked me.
Art, especially the Queer Art I’m making, want to speak of other type human stories, the ones that touch me and you. Artists speak of your life, the media only documents it, often in a distorted, edited way.
It’s not just a man loving another man, it’s a human loving another. It’s the rapport between two men, from friendship, love, care, violence, competition. It’s of course, not about reproduction, the primordial purpose of coitus. That’s behind us; we can evolve using all these tools of understanding ourselves and each other, Sex and Art being just some of them.

A Man back in the glory days of Greek philosophy said: “know thyself”.
He didn’t say love yourself, hate yourself for what you think you know about yourself. Start with knowing, without judging. There will be plenty out there offering this service for free, judging you, as they don’t like to judge themselves.