In the past months I have been working on a language of symbols, a body of visual material. Blood kept coming back. I was trying to communicate my internal (psychological) life through painterly devices, working towards adding more symbols, colour, and characters to my language. I have included the ones I found most “successful” in a composition, which for the moment I have just called Blood series (Blood-installation view).

I think of all the images, despite having different titles, as a single work altogether, so the arrangement was very important to me. An evolving cohesive work where other pieces might be added or substituted eventually, as language evolves and objects assume different meaning. I used multiplicity and layering, to bring the depth and render visible to consciousness unconscious phenomena (I also made an association with the work I saw last year at the Venice Biennale by Chiara Enzo, in her case depicting body parts).

About the chapter on Blood, Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction. It reminded me how these images I have produced are linked to my Catholic upbringing. I am not religious, but these images are inbred in you when you are raised in Florence, you almost breathe through them, every church you enter in. Crucifixion and blood. This is particularly striking to me now, that I live in Calvinist Geneva, where religious images are nowhere to be found.  In particular, with The offering I referred to the idea of Art as a ritual: ordinary objects or acts acquire symbolic significance through incorporation into a shared belief system. Here blood is an image of sacrifice, “stealing” from the Christian image where the blood of Jesus is drunk. The blood of Jesus is so sacred that it is symbolically drunk to this day by believing Christians as promising redemption and eternal life. I represented it as a stain inside and outside the glass. It is held by a feminine hand; she is offering her blood. I am hinting at sacrifice but also vitality and femininity, fertility, reproduction, childbirth, violence.

As in Haircut of the braid , I went back to the idea of sacrifice and self-mutilation with 2 still life drawings on fabric: Scissors and Still life with braid, scissors with hair and a braid with flowers in a still life composition came back as symbols. The flowers are a powerful symbol to me, again images I see often and mostly in association with loss and trauma.

Do you think of these as paintings of paintings? Or at least paintings of other images? It could be the loss of the image as much as the real thing that is being mourned or witnessed? I do think of these paintings as paintings of other images. Eventually the loss of the image which is mourned takes place during image reproduction. The creative act repetitively reproduces the experience of loss. This was particularly obvious to me in the making of cyanotypes in the series, where I repetitively reproduced the same image and repetition of loss worked like a catalyst. The act of imitation and repetition led to systematic loss in witnessing the copy of the image, and it was somehow extremely satisfactory. 

I found the process most soothing and almost alchemic. A process in which by mixing chemical fluids I could obtain a transmutation of matter, where these ghost images begin to take form and are almost self-producing, in which I feel I bypass the most conscious use of my hand gestures and access an outwardly dimension. Almost archetypes, they feel like innate images, reminiscent of collective memory as in a Jungian diagram. As in making them I am accessing the collective unconscious.

The garment reminds me of the type of underwear used by my grandmother, almost referring to a family heritage and made me think again about the Jungian diagram of a biological unconscious. My grandmother cannot and could never drive or even ride a bike (she was never taught to, being a woman). I remember when I turned 18, I was trying insistently to convince her to take her driving license with me, promising her I would help her study. The garment and the lace fabric cyanotypes remind me of my grandmother generation, traditional gender roles and takes me back the idea of the collective unconscious. 

When I introduced the garment as an object itself in the installation, I have been entertaining myself with the idea of ‘staging’ my work; in this sense it has a function to turn the paintings into a form of ‘prop’. I also made a strange association with Mesmer, stage hypnosis and their shocking outcomes. 

I love Serrano’s work and I am very attracted by the use of body fluids to obtain images of such strength and beauty. I was also thinking about the reference of Melanie Klein:” the blissful mergence with the object and the rage and fear dealt out against the object.” I actually do experience rage against my images while in the making, sometimes having to resist the urge to tear them apart, often having to walk out of the studio to avoid doing so or by switching to work on another image to take some distance from the one I felt rage against. I don’t know why that is the case but have learned to accept it without being upset as I used to. This strong powerful feeling is followed by a calm, depressive state. It is in this space that I think I feel most comfortable and absorbed and my creative process most productive. And I see why “melancholy is a mean to maintain one psychic integrity.”

Looking at Blood-installation view on the wall, I started to focus on the aesthetics of the whole composition. My intention was never to be macabre in my use (and thoughts) of blood. Even my idea of violence speaks of “natural” violence: the innate fear, intensity and ferocity which is intrinsic to human being. It reminded me of the story of Venus: “After Saturn castrates Uranus, his mutilated genitals are thrown into the Sea, and from this horrific act the goddess of Beauty is born”. Reminiscent of this convergence of images of Beauty and Horror, the screen of aesthetics as veil against violence, fear, sabotage. However, I started to think

Is this composition too pretty? Am I communicating my message effectively? 

These questions are also appropriate for my flower series. I am afraid most people will only see a “bucolic and dreamy, almost a little kitsch” image.  Am I communicating effectively melancholy, loss? Am I hiding too much behind my work’s aesthetics? Do I feel like I have to justify “my pink aesthetics”?