THE EMBODIMENT

I am not interested in the naked body, but in the undressed body. I always paint people who are undressed.

Clothing is always a kind of mask, a screen, a disguise, a fabrication. Through it we manifest our relationship to reality — our desires, fears, dreams and disappointments. What we belong to, or what we aspire to belong to. The situation of being undressed always places us outside our usual form; we are thrown out of convention. Only the exposed human being, entangled in the act of covering, is truly real.

For me, embodiment is a game between the anonymity of the exposed body and the personalization of the covered body. It is an interpersonal game, a game of revealing oneself to others.

Body – Face

In ancient Greece, all cultural phenomena were understood as belonging to two opposing and conflicting worlds, the worlds of the gods Apollo and Dionysus. They existed as oppositional yet complementary phenomena, two sides of the same coin.

The Greeks understood the Apollonian and the Dionysian as an opposition between the static and the moving, between what is objectified and dispassionate and what is immediate and emotional. They placed Apollonian intellect against Dionysian sensuality, and the Dionysian dynamism of phenomena against Apollonian stillness. The intellectual against the sensual.

This opposition also concerned the body and the face. The Apollonian face was opposed to the Dionysian body.

In this opposition, I stand on the side of the body.

In truth, the body is created only by another body.

The mere existence of bodies beside one another creates an intimate relationship, and with it an erotic context. Eroticism is always connected with an extreme form of intimate closeness and with the objectification of the body. In eroticism, these two things always occur together and cannot be separated.

Of course, the body also reduces the body when multiplied by multiplicity; and even the body kills the body, disembodies it, when multiplied into the uncountable.

On a nudist beach there are no undressed bodies, only naked bodies.

The body on a nudist beach is abstracted from its corporeality, somehow bracketed by its multiplication, by the multitude of other bodies. It becomes uncountable, impersonal, non-intimate.

For me, embodiment is a kind of relational form that we create around our corporeality — a form that emerges between the unconditionality of the naked body and the conventionality of the dressed body. A form that exists between our corporeality and the corporeality of others.

As Gombrowicz puts it:

“I myself do not need form; I need it only so that the other can see me.”