Porn (back) to Art

Posted on by Mon Graffito

When you look at an object, an image, that object looks back at you.

For instance, a Viking sword, you go to a museum and look at it, admire the rusted metal. Stories are triggered up in your mind. They are certainly different from the thoughts a Briton had, a thousand years ago, when she saw the sword approaching in the strong arm of a shouting man with a tattooed face.

Pornography comes from the Greek words of prostitute (porne) and stories or images (graphos).
Back in the day the prostitutes were citizens performing a certain social job (you got it) and had a certain station in society. They were looked upon in a very different way than “modern” day folk do.
The person and the job remained the same throughout millennia so what changed?

Want to know something about yourself, see what the object you are looking at sees in you.

Moving closer to the porn imagery.
Look at a man drinking urine coming straight from a vagina. Most probably you say “yak!”.

Andres Serrano took and exposed such a photograph. In some cities he was booed, in other praised. His portfolio is displayed in art books mostly titled “Eretica”, to name just one of the many.

If those who exclaimed “yak!” saw a picture of a man urinating on a woman they’d probably say “hell, yea!”. See where I’m going?
If you saw a picture of a man lying in a bathtub, several men standing around and pissing on the guy, who looks happy and drinks as much as he can, you’d say…. Go ahead, say it loud! There is no judgment in any of this, just a suggestion for self-assessing.

Drinking urine is a common practice in several Hindu movements. Recycling your morning liquid discharge or someone else’s yellow fluid is not dangerous (unless infection is present in the bladder).
I am in no way promoting this practice, either for religious beliefs or sexual gratification. Do what you need to and enjoy. I used the example because I thought it could be clear to everyone.

Some social platforms distance themselves from what is today mostly understood as pornography. Those try to purify the human nature of sexual behavior in its many natural forms, yet allowing human violence in all its forms to be fully represented. It’s simply their decision.
Some money makers recognized the financial potential and push out a lot of material. Estimations for the US market range from 15 to 97 billion dollars a year. What I read there is the amount of sex-related imagery and objects served to the people. It is easy to agree that even drinking too much water can kill a man, although we are made of 60% water (the brain and the heart contain 73%).

The amount of porn out there is amazing and funny! Who could have imagined housewives, CEOs, priests and people in retirement homes would like to share with the world selfies of their private parts?

Regardless of the consensual sexual acts I see online, I try to look behind it, to see the people performing those acts, imagine their motivation, just like I sometimes try to imagine van Gogh’s motivation of painting a field with crows.

When I was young, the slightest allusion to sex aroused me: from just a thought to seeing 2 cm under the skirts of a woman sitting in the tram, even some tree knots resembling vaginas were sufficient to heat up my brains. These days I’m the one going to Moulin Rouge and watching the public.
This is how I approach the subjects in my drawings and most of all, the sculptures.
Statues are so much more physical, carving them, touching them gets me more involved in what’s being born there, on the work table. They help me see better inside myself as well.
My sculptures are small enough to be hold in the hand, viewed from all angles until they wake up a part of you. Find out what the object you’re looking at sees when it looks back at you.

My Cheeky Toy

Posted on by Mon Graffito

How Sculpture entered my life

As Greek blood boy, I got my “heritage training”. My father took me places where statuary marble or bronze bodies were towering over me.
I cannot be sure of the thoughts I had back then but what’s important is how I “remember” them: it was an opportunity to look at those marble people as much as I pleased, walk around them with curiosity and owe. They were not bothered… And they were arching over time, to say something to ME, the little Mon.

My father’s job brought us to various countries. Outside the Greek & Roman “big history business”, I entered small, poor churches financed by the villagers, not the potent religion mongers. The paintings and statues I saw in such churches, on road-shrines and in village fairs were simple, sincere. The figurines were made of wood or clay, painted over with pigments that would soon crack and partially peel off.
Poor art was something I connected to in a different way than the “High Art” in Pantheons, Vaticans and other Musea. This poor art was my first step towards my spiritual skies.
This is the look/style I want to dress my work in.

The “Chernobyl” look
in the original movie The Planet of the Apes the human pilot who travels into the future (without knowing) discovers some children’s toys from his times. Simple dolls damaged by time, with the shine chipped off, with broken limbs.
That scene moved me a lot. I was a child when the movie came out and those dolls spoke of the children caught in the destruction brought on by adults.
I get similar goosebumps when I look at photos taken in the Chernobyl village. Homes abandoned by families, without knowing at the time that they will never come back. Discarded toys, rotten pages of coloring books left uncolored.

Love of detail and difficult tasks
If something is easy to make, anyone could do it. I wouldn’t feel like pushing the ball up the hill.

I admire the reverence Japanese workers have for what they do. Details speak a lot, people take the time to notice those details. The Netsuke first looked like small toys for me, before I paid attention to the details carved and started to see a story in that drop of art. A drop that took many hours, love, perseverance and skill to make so those artisans had to be taken seriously.

I put a lot of work in detail; what if the sculpture I make comes alive? It happened to Gepetto.
I’m not Nature’s photocopy machine, not a hyperrealist artisan but creations that walk parallel to what Nature did are branching out of a visual logic and beauty that brings back beauty in our lives.

Speaking of visual logic, sculpting offers the opportunity to look from many angles and the created object. As I make my sculptures in a toy size, one can hold them in the hand and observe even more contours. I call those the “song lines”.
The pose , the volumes are the first things noticed about a sculpture. The contours remind me of sound waves, translating into a visual music. They must be sounds that go together in the symphony of a statue.
And just as in speech and music, where the silence between the words or notes matters as much as the notes, in sculpture space is enclosed within the composition. In Ikebana the space inside the floral arrangement is called Ma and an expert eye knows how to get the most of it.

My Cheeky Toy (mycheekytoy.com)

Of all the objects I create with my hands, sculpting is the most satisfying one! (and sometimes the food I prepare, sometimes…)

Creating a “little body” out of clay, carving one in wood or stone calls up instincts similar to producing life. No wonder myths, legends, religions, use this as a metaphor to describe the rapport between creator and created. One reason why Geppetto and his burattino (wooden puppet in Italian) Pinocchio is the cultural icon that is.

In an age of mass production, I probably bark up the wrong tree when I say working with your hands, creating a unique piece of something is synonym to meditation.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover the (work)shops where young men (not kids!) sit around a large table and painstakingly paint small resin miniatures. One day I went in and watched these creators. Talking about my unique statues vs factory produced toys, I was introduced to new materials and the idea of a short series. I felt like an ignorant!

What:

The bridge between mass production and unique pieces, just like the Japanese woodcut prints.

Apart from the website chapters showing unique pieces, the short series (up to 10) statues start as hand made prototypes. When I’m pleased with the result, I make the molds, pour the resins, hand paint individual statues. I understand some collectors like to know they belong to a small, closed circle of people owning a certain statuette. But there will always be a slight difference between them, as each is painted individually.

The artist thanks you for re-blogging

Posted on by Mon Graffito

NeuronValley, my Etsy shop. I only make/sell unique works, no duplicates. Very affordable prices. Galleries would add 45-50% to the price listed on Etsy. Etsy charges only 3.5% but I need to find the people who will adopt my babies (You guessed right, my works are my babies)
If you like (and yet not ready to buy original art), please at least reblog. The artist thanks you.

NeuronValley on Etsy

Visual Riddles

Posted on by Mon Graffito

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.

to the Male Hooker

Posted on by Mon Graffito

Many years ago I lived not far from a place where men worked the street. With some I chatted, I’m fond of extraordinary surviving life stories, especially in the western world where I live. Throughout the years I read books, accounts of a reality otherwise foreign to me. Moved by their life stories I started writing poems about these boys, drawing portraits for a small fee I paid the model. This statue is a one only piece dedicated to them.

bronze statue 36 cm tall (for sale)
https://youtu.be/cCLwGZJyXtcbtonze statue


http://www.patreon.com/mongraffito

The Seasons of Man

Posted on by Mon Graffito

I just finished the wax version of these basreliefs.
The Seasons of Man: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.
I finished the wax basreleifs.
People who don’t speak Art would probably only see pornography.
Individual 15 mins guided tours: 5 euros.

Seasons of Man
Spring
Spring
Spring
Summer
Summer
Summer
Fall
Fall
Fall
Fall
Winter
Winter
Winter
Winter