Dionysos | Dragon Lady | Maya Monotype | Bondage & Freedom | Lady of the Ants | Sky Umbilicus

Bondage and Freedom
June, 2002

"Bondage and freedom" are my for-last prints realized in September 2003 at my Long Island City, New York studio. It is printed mainly in monotype and 10 editions of 5 prints, acrylic silkscreened on Rives B.F.K. paper 10"x10". It have been shown at gallery 138, New York, in November 2005, and also available at my new studio in Besançon, France.

“This magic moment when horrible suffering transforms itself into an ocean of pleasure.”


The images of Bondage & Freedom are a perfect metaphor of the current human condition. Man has invented social systems that exceed human measure and crush individuals in an infernal kaleidoscopic spiral. Every human being is a slave, and this outrageous craziness is that of the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution, when life was so fragile, so violent, so hazardous. It is anti-life, anti-love and the roaring violence of life. The body is tied up: submissive, imprisoned, mutilated in social, monetary, ideological, environmental, terrorist and religious shackles, where the only escape is climax: the transmutation of pain into pleasure.

The images of Bondage & Freedom are also profoundly engraved with the universal human memory of expiatory sacrifice. As within each of us, the memory of a hunter, a cannibal and a sacrificer remain, and what is more violent than to sacrifice woman's beauty to Gods? Contemporary pornography is ritualistic as were the ancient rites performed by the priestesses of Isis, or Dionysus. It is total negation of the ego: the body becomes object, solar and fragmentary explosion like a corpse, meat on a butcher's rack, or fetish... Immersion in the universal, unsaid, unbelonging, lost, magic and the sacred. Systematic fragmentation and annihilation of the seductive image that Woman projects herself when she dominates Man. It is the still dance of the nude body, open, spread out, offered. The skin switching between tears of pleasure and tears of suffering. Orifices filled with the juice of terror and the expectation of fire.

Bondage is a deviation of impotent, childish men who’s Persona is subjugated by the unreachable desire of women’s sexual climax, satisfaction that they cannot fulfill. It is a pathetic metaphor of human sexual experience. In the place where chauvinist culture does not have the means to satisfy women's desire, men dominate women by humiliating them. Tied, humiliated, tortured and submissive, woman remains beautiful, queenly and serene, and man looks like a stupid lowly butcher, or an executioner from the Middle Ages.

These images have the same religious presence as some western images of Crucifixion. They picture the moment of a vitrified death in an erotic pre-mortem trance, and they have the immanent beauty of the sacred shroud of Turin. Every culture has invented its own violence to heal itself of its great fear of death, desire, absence, departure, impotence and the ephemeral beauty of life.

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