Ausgewählte Werke - Seite 1

Annonciation
1962, 88 x 128 cm
Collection of Eduardo Oroache, Palma de Mallorca
 
Annonciation is the first painting I painted after my initial New York awakening. I was 28 years old and at the peak of my molecular bio-energy. You can feel the sudden burst of the Big Apple's electric zap in the composition after all the early years of adolescent brooding over potatoes und eggs. Where shall I start and where shall I finish with Jill? This was always my problem. She was a lush and pulpy guadeloupean volcano, and mount pele doesn't erupt very often but when it does 40.000 people pass away carried by her lava into the caribean sea. And all of them were her lovers. The girl that posed for the red angel, one knee on chair, hand holding a string hanging from a ceiling (in those days a photograph wouldn't do, I needed the erotic tension of a live model inside my studio) is a muscular peasant girl who by pure coincidence of 'fate' (my favourite goddess) is also from Guadeloupe. No, she wasn't a dancer, she acquired those muscles carrying vegetables to the city market. I found her posing for art students at the academy where I used to go sketching in the evenings. (You cannot mention the angel and not mention the virgin Mary!)

Nativity
1962, 87 x 127,5 cm
Collection of Bruce Bard, California
 
I'm not a leg man, nor a foot fetishist, I don't even look at peoples shoes and buying a pair for myself usually ends in disaster. I am an eye-man, a soul-peeper. When confronted with a living creature I look into it's eyes first and establishe contact. Eyes come first, than the face and the hands. Very importand the hands. I'm a sucker for a good pair of hands; smooth, tanned, long sinewy fingers ending with sesitive fingerprint bulbs. I prefer chewed off fingernails, a sign of vivid nervousness, you can keep your nonchalant and phlegmatic nailfilers.

Apocalypse of St. John
1963, 50 x 50 cm, series of five paintings
Collection of Bettina Rheims
 
In the beginnings was the letter M and all was MMMMMM. As soon as I exited my mother's womb I cried: AAAAAH! With relief and my with first breath of fresh air. Then I looked so up and saw my mother's tit. It looked so good I cried: Ma! With the only two letters I know. Then I saw the other tit and sang MAMAMAMA! And that is when the trouble started: As soon as I was sucking on one tit I was dreaming about the other one that was surely fuller. The word satan comes from the word shad which means tit which means double which means devil. To do one thing while craving another is my definiton of evil.

Time
1965, 86 x 86 cm
Collection of Kurt Bergstorm, Paris
 
The trouble between you and me is that one of us is always faster, I mean exactly half past now or a quater to later, I'll be many years old which doesn't seem much considering that I'm only twice your age not counting my birth which lasted forever! It took millions of years to extract me from your uterus or someone's who felt like yours compared to your penetration which was much to short even though the climax is lasting an eternity and I wish it could stop so that we can synchronize our watches and do it again and let's try to get it right this time, OK?!

Byzantine Angel
1966, 49,5 x 49,5 cm
Collection of the artist
 
Some grow a third eye when in Tibet. I grew a third nostril in Istanbul, a mystic nostril with which I could smell secret societies, reunions of templars and whirling dervishes, nestorians, agnostics and kabbalists. I walked around the streets in desperate search of a revelation that would give me the key to the deciphering of the mysterious letters I could discern in the wrinkles around the laughing eyes of the byzantine angel that kept alluring me. When in Istanbul I walked around taking snapshots of various buildings for the purpose of composing a large architectural painting of Istanbul, where one might read 2000 years of history off the facade of one single building with a ground floor of ancient roman stones with byzantine columns; second floor byzantine, 3rd floor ottoman baroque, 4th floor suburban Puerto Rico art deco, I always had the impression of the characters of Durrell's novels still cavorting inside these dark grey and damp buildings.

Astral Body Awake
1969, 63,3 x 91 cm
Collection of Anemonz, Paris
 
Crystalline September on Deya beach-house. When she posted, coming up, salty with sea, the peroxide, ectoplasmic sphinx instantly evoked translucent erotic witches gliding through space on electric hairdriers emetting laser beams from hers to mine. She would stay all day nailed under the sun yet her skin remained as white as a blow of snow in a mushroom cave, and us, the merry rollers of Mary Jain, we sat at her talcum feet and showered her with music sweeet until the sun the moon would greeet. In those days she was my soul-brother Leon's groove, and incest was unheard of in the famliy... but not unfelt... so...

Moses & Aaron
1970, 75 x 75 cm
Collection of Earl Mack, New York
 
I had two extra tits grafted on her chest. Thus providing enough milk for all the Children of Israel, and instead of the Red Sea parting in two I painted Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments in the form of the kabbalistic tree of life. The landscape that posed for Mount Sinai and his promised landslides is a slice of Majorka - which, of course, is the best part of Israel. Moses, after getting rich on building pyramids for the crazy egyptians, had enough one day and took his children of israel to live in Mallorca. He got lost on the way and the rest is Hysterie.

Turkish Delight
1970, 60 x 60 cm,
Collection of Jo Ohana, Casablanca
 
Some seven years ago in Casablanca, Ibrahim Hammam, moroccan sugar king and daddy, hands me an old and faded photograph of his parents, a group of faceless ghosts, standing in the courtyard of their ancestral palace in Fez. Ibrahim commissions me to do a painting of it. I added a few extra architectural details from various Moroccan postcards, and while leafing through an Arab pictorial magazine one day, I came across the dramatic face of an obscure Tunisian actress. I painted her into the foreground right and called the picture Turkish Delight. A tribute to Ibrahim's sweet tooth. And I was right! a week later he had her for dinner...

Brooks
1970, 85 x 85 cm
Collection of Julia Murphy, New York
 
As a token of gratitude to Richard Thunderclap for donating 25.000 $ towards the building of my Aleph Sanctuary, I decided to give him a portrait of his daughter Brooks. She posed for the face but for the body I used a Penthouse sirene from the same mould as Brooks. Upon presentation of his present Richard looked slightly embarrassed. He never came to pick it up. When Brooks saw a reproduction of it in my God Jokes book, she too was embarrassed. What for me seemed like the land of milk and honey for them seemed the theater of the ridiculous.
"I am the word
I am my image
I am the sword I am my dream
My dream of cream
In which I drown
Loosing kingdom loosing crown
I am not white I am not brown (- and with a stiff upper lip:)
And I certainly don't want to be your clown."

Live
1971, 90 x 90 cm
Collection of Jo Ohana, Casablanca
 
"I want you to paint a cover for my next album Live Evil. Evil is live spelled backward, dig? Front cover should represent life..." "Gotcha, Miles! I just finished it an hour ago, a pregnant lady from the dark side of the sun." "So paint the evil side now, you know, I want a toad! A big bad toad." Just as a clock's ticking is sometimes only noticed once it stops, likewise did I realize I had been staring at the very toad unconsciously ever since I'd picked up the phone. It was J. Egar Hoover's grim face on the cover of a Newsweek magazine laying on the floor by my feet. "I've got the model for your toad in front of my very eyes, Maestro, do you always have to be right on, man?" "Except when I got shot at, so better get down and do it to it, Matt." By the time our black cat, Mustafa, had the honor of eating the afterbirth right after the birth of my favourite tadpole, la divine Serafina, in our bedroom, J. Edgar Toad was finally ready to leap over the gap of all those countless miles that separate live from evil. Or, as Gaugin put it: "The ugly may be beautiful, but the pretty never."
 
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