The great angel is located at the entrance and the exit of the amazonian field
he is the finality or the first child, that I don't really know.
Anyway it's a figure that has a really big terrestrial body
and, in the same time, a celestial body, eyes made of antique glasses
...a very ancient mirror who doesn't have any anecdotes about it's body
it's an amazonian body, without anecdotes, without history
...in fact it's an eternal body.
What is the Amazonian Angel?
The Amazonian Angel is probably my dream.
Maybe it's the biggest wish I've ever made,
maybe it's who I am.
That I don't know either
It's a clear figure, that's really really clean
that is absolutely moral
Nietzsche spoke about the Übermensch
... I don't believe in it, I think that the angel, curiously for me
is a human being if he's really human
in the same time, it's of course an androgynous figure.
I don't mean feminine
I think that you've also mentioned other winged figure?
Winged? That aren't angel?
What would they be then?
Harpy?
Ahhh! but they're also angels
for me the harpies and demons are all part of the same world, that's part of the angelic.
Absolutely, I really do not see the angel like it's seen by any religion
it's a religion that also amazonian, and it comes from the depth of Babylon
A harsh world where Ishtar was still on Earth.
And where she certainly had harpy's claws and angel's wings.
They are complete beings, for me they're what's the most complete.
What is the amazon for you, is it the amazonians or the jungle? Or both?
It's the amazonian jungle of course!
it's the most exquisite, the most extraordinary and also the most terrible plurality.
And so I've slept on my back.
A hand to protect the frontiers of the sex,
a hand to look through the sun rays,
another one to arm the heart,
the fourth one like a hedge, over the lips.
A hand to protect the frontiers of the sex,
a hand to look through the sun rays,
another one to arm the heart,
the fourth one like a hedge, over the lips.
the fifth one to close my eyes, whose's suspicion was too dazzling,
one to dig the crease on the forehead,
the other one to support the affront of the sun, without sex and without arrow
the smoothest and most unified body of the world
night after night, overcame by a gorgon's gargoyle mask
and a trace of a stored seesaw,
against which I occasionally came leaving my sweat
exhaling my dark plinth, my forbidden sadness.
It was a time of shortage, where they will cover me with salt, under which I bend. Me, and my seven figures,
one of them belonging to the enigma. (repeated)
First, I addressed the time, then the language.
And then I though about it like a mirror standing above the salt of the abyss
I lived until the thirteen hours of your fragile morning
spreading the excess of your minutes, and their primordial water.
And in the dandy chopper, adding the progress of the fire
through the smoke, a church entered my body,
by taking the safest alley, in war against life, which choose the narrow ways of sex.
I cried on those first chapters of this tolerated first dawn.
My arm held thigh by a weary necklace, on my exposed breast.
The shadow had blown away what we left of the yellow bright wine. (repeated)
Rising insomniac moon
Marble... Smoke. The Mouth, Underground... Will find... Black...Soil.
I found in your mouth, the taste of the sea and lavender.
(the sea) and I incline myself in front of the unique foam
(lavender) the one from my time, manure of my life
(foam) Your gaze is so dark and broad, that for a thousand years I've search in those hostile straw (salt)
I want you to stay right here by the pure furor of my saliva
(enamel) I sing calmy in your closed ear, and you salute in a movement so long (saliva) that our edge burn endlessly
(the ear... without an end)
(speaking german... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
I have returned in an immense insomniac moon
In my body, marble sieve, where tremble invinsible smoke
when I want to inflate your mouth with pale flowers, when I want to take your underwater face
and follow the excessive writing of the lightning, on the surface of your raw cum.
(speaking german...)
Will we fly together once more? On the one with the bursted back,
in the bluish cornfield and the fiery reflect.
Will we hold open the sliding breast and the slit of every tremors, with the bright fire of all the dead language (repeat)
Will we write us! us! us! using blood and honey, and about our trips over the quarry, in the firmament.
Parchment for the future of the amazon.
While dating her, I tent the wind, and it's large purple and hyacinth birds.
My dear and unique travelers.
The androgynous one in each of my psychic dwelling.
The urgent queen arise from their only origins which is the tone.
They rise from fuliginous futur, in the frame of the masterpiece, where I sow laughing powder with the color of true love, on the drawing of the loved body.
Here the blue and the red embrace to make a soaring passion violet.
Where dawn bite de sole of the overseas, for the birth of the Three of Life in sienna,
as a belly button of a tall goddess resurrected.
Tense from future lights, the strength, in love with the women but standing with audacious dream
and it gives her, in a powerful move, the fiery wings of the becoming being.
She loves me. (repeated over and over)
Amazons, warriors, witches, nuns, simple actresses of themselves
bitching and loving, wearing roots, brief, hybrid, their imboile guts, screw at the bottom of the sowed deaths.
where they tears the outdated butterfly, thus, to form this petrified universe, their fable saliva.
Conversing sisters, there, behind the black birch, they speak a mythical german, and their wondering tongues, caress an open speech.
We're giving ourselves the warriors, the goddess, the narrating prophetess, the liquidator agitators,
the originators, the dispensors, the creators, the builders, the donors,
all shadow cutters, singing with upside down sieves.
Lady of the night, of the shadows and of the horde. Ishtar of the desire. Epona baptized by the lonely horse. Pandora without it's gun.
Morrigan queen of the nightmare. Aria rood the huntress. The hurried Cicada. Damped Pandora. Tare. Generated. Punished.
Happily desired (???) Dare the worst (???) Lady with the mule.
In the exact floathing madness. Spans your body, marble sieve. Where tremble the vanquished smoke of your bed
and return to Saint Island. Ishtar... Alieno...
Childhood, first and foremost the birth. I was born in one of the worst moments of this century, I think, when the devil reign on Earth.
In a fortress, in Poland, Wrocław, and this birth bother me and concern me very much.
And I call it the birth of Ridis because I'm working on this birth, like all that's my body and my being.
Because I feel like I was born in the kingdom of the dead. It was the Third Reich.
And I was born by caesarean, that also makes me work and think alot because I never knew my mother like we could know your mother today.
She was in a coma, she was under anesthesia, she wasn't there, she could neither see me, nor caress me, nor dress me, nor feed me. And I had to wait a really long time to see her waking up from her sickness.
For a long time and from every angle, I had the impression that I was born from a sickness.
I though alot about it, but alas, I was born from the hand of a nazi surgeon and when my mother woke up and asked "is the child alive?"
"But of course she's alive, that little princess of the Third Reich!" And then she started to cry appallingly.
And my mother was part of the resistance, they called her "the Angel of Lublin"
What we were living at Lublin, then Kraków, then Warsaw, and constantly hiding from people. So I've seen people than my people were killing.
After that, I thankfully had a great attraction to those people and a guilt complex for all my generation.
There is a really great culpability. Mine will disappear along with my physical disappearance.
I could never heal from it, there is absolutely no remedy for this.
Then we fled Poland, we arrived Germany, and there we suffered a great deal.
There I've met hunger, genuine hunger and true misery
the real poverty. I think that today we often talk about hunger, but we don't know what it is
to live only out of potato peel and to be a kid. Yes that's about it.
The ruins, the dust, the misery.
I had to work really young, as a child, I was already delivering newspaper and the german's newspaper was really important.
That is to say it was hard work to carry those weight.
And then I was a errand girl, for a store at the port and I brought mattress and duvet to clean and brought them back.
And then I was an usherette at the cinema and we needed that money because my mother studied medecine.
And she couldn't finish, she was really sick, my father had left us, we had no money and I had to work and I was the eldest. I was replacing my father, so I proceeded to work those different jobs.
On the matter of my education, it didn't came up, that was out of the question, how to find the money? Impossible.
The word "self-taught". Already, we imagine it's a person that teach itself everything. But it's never without the help of someone
and without the rescue of someone. So, at first my mother was my master, that's for sure. She opened me all the doors to all those culture
And, that's a world so much more vast than university school, finally. Vaster, deeper and lonelier. That is to say that I wandered at any sight. We must not forget, this passed through a lot of countries and languages.
I self-taugh myself some things by reading I think. By reading and looking. By traveling and by never neglecting any museum.
But I was alone with my though I wasn't guided by anyone.
I think that I studied along but perhaps I'm not really self-taught. I also had master, only I never knew them physically.
And we always find that same problem, the physical absence, through all my life, I was always denied a body, that's why I'm painting bodies now.
So I left Germany, I only had seventeen years, I came to Paris.
Where I had a really miserable life, then I went to Spain, where life was also miserable, then I came back, then I was in Africa.
And after a brief moment I moved to Paris, a while understanding that here I couldn't do much. And that where I tried many jobs. I worked for Interpol as a librarian, I was mannequin at Home Garo.
I don't know, I must've tried everything worth doing in that state.
At Paris, I started my wax paintings over a bathtub, I was paiting I was making such a mess.
I found the people really kind, they borrowed me a working space and I painted there. I what I wanted was to flee the city, go to the countryside and essentially rebuilding houses.
I live on a high land, on a mountain of some sort, a tray, but my story with nature has become really strange, there's so much nature that I almost never go out.
Finally, I'm very much cloistered.
There's so much nature.
And when I get out, I bless her she's marvelous, she's helping me feel good. Perhaps I don't really like the nature and the earth very much, I don't know...
Perhaps I'm living like this because... in the city and with the others, they'd... break my strengh, while on the land here it's huge, it can act for the others.
I think that I'd be nothing in a city and that I'm everything right here.
But the high tray, it's Saint-Rémi, it's Le Gare, it's the midday land and there there's other things. Because that's an aesthetic attraction.
And that actually comes from our german intellectual training, wheter we are cultivate or not, self-taugh or not, we are nurished with Hellenism.
And we're looking for this, we're looking for that world where we can watch a hill and say "here comes the goddess and the gods!" We're searching the source, we're searching the sky, we're searching the myth.
Our people are really passionate about mythology. And when I saw those air, I understood that's what I wanted, and not those great german forest,
with their ghost and their dead, I wanted some kind of creating solitude,
very clear, Hellenistic and open on the sea and really really high.
I had a desire and a project of a great tribe of women and amazons. So I painted them as I think they'd be
and for all this time I had the impression of painting and writing those characters like it was them that wanted me to do it
and that I was only the instrument. Where did those figure came from? I cannot say.
But certainly there is a link, between those characters and me, on milleniums and continents, and that's truly real.
In history, there was people just like me, so I dedicated all my life, to wake them up, I'll wake them to the story of now and this story only
and I painted all those characters, yes, amazons, demons, great ogres, terrible characters, but terribly good, terribly strong, there was nothing small, nothing shabby, nothing classically feminine, although feminine in the antic sense.
I also painted a lot of those figures that live with me, those articulated dolls, those possessed figures and right now I'm doing some work I'm calling Neo-Hellenistic, but it's calm, it's really quiet
So I'm doing a painting, where I come close to what I perhaps love the most in the world, phylosophy, not the one that's dry in the book, the one that's lived.
And every characters, is a thinking character. That is to say I paint thinking ladies
and they're greek, yes.
(mostly made up words)...Harpy, the flow of the virgin and the whore... precious and ogre... going to the black sugar by squeaky steps... drinking the ash saturated water, between salted black water, where suddenly roses goes through the roof.
There are really made like fresco, that's a cardboard that's coated with plaster and stucco, like we did some time ago.
With a tempera way, that is wet, then there's poster paint, then I do some terrible cooking, with soap and wax and all this gives the impression that they're not from this time, but that they're from 4000 years ago.
I have the impression that I'm doing the portrait, not the one of the great person that I admire and that I know of, but really of all those women that we don't know, because we destroyed their trace and I'm working to recreate the portraits that others destroyed.
I use pigments, that's the base of every painting and in the old days, in Egyptian technics, hmm, called encaustic, for funeral paint, we mixed it with wax, in fact.
But I introduced, I rediscovered without even knowing it, but I introduced a lot of objects in this bulk, that the Egyptians weren't doing. Then, after the Egyptians, we used to same pigments as always and we added egg yolks and oil.
But not me, I never do that, I always use wax and grease finally. And I always said this is the original grease where we come from, it's an animal grease and that make some kind of dough, together with grease and earth we make the body.
At the time my workshop looked like a dump for old clothes and tissues and also a public dumpster, a trashcan. That was terrifying enough, they were many insects and rats and everything possible but there was wasted and even rat shit could be part of the painting.
And so I took a huge canvas, I set it up, I cooked and boil paraffins, that's derivated from petroleum, I think.
And,and, it made black smoke, it created an atmosphere where I could barely see and I saw at best the shape of my painting, nothing more. On the ground, on my knees, almost laying on my canvas and inside, inside that canvas and that body I painted alot with my hand, I burned my hands
and at this time I was an early bird, although normally I hated waking up early, but now there was all of my people. There was all those figures, I would wake up and tell them "hi", their eyes were mirrors.
And so I would see myself and the world in their eyes. It's truly an act of love and an art of love that I was doing.
It was a ritual, I think, a birth ritual, apart from the blood and biological body like we know it, but really strong in it's body, in it's materiality and it's matrix
and in fact I adorn them of all I could find in the nature, like at the seashore, small plates debris, bricks, tiles, rusty nails and bird's feather and dried flowers.
Additionally, the differences between those paintings and normal painting is that we can caress them, and the sense of smell get satisfied, wax smell very good.
I heard it's a really curious painting, we can't really say it's a painting, perhaps they're low relief.
We categorized me as an art brut painter, that must've came from Dubuffet, he was the creator of this movement, let say, well he at least made the discovery, he was a theoretician and I had for a time a correspondence with him.
But I don't think he really considered me as an "art brut" I am at the limit of this, I'm at the fringe somewhere.
There's part of my work we could call art brut, because what I'm doing isn't academical.
"it's an unscathed art of all culture" definition that Dubuffet has made in his theory. That's what he said. But I do not share his position because for me culture is love, it's always where you love that you're cultivated
and I think that those persons that he said about "they are unscathed of all culture" he wasn't right because they weren't unscathed of love, they loved what they were doing, they didn't learn at school how to paint, there really solitary person and like you know it
shut in insane asylum, essentially, that's where it all began.
I'm in the annex of the museum of art brut, I'm part of those singular peoples, singular in an artistic way and that's also a curious thing because which artist isn't singular?
It's also part of my job and essentially I collect women art, what they could do in those previous century, while they were shut in.
They generally didn't had access to art. Those sign of their lives, what they did, that touched me, I'm passionated about it, it wasn't anything rational but I was attracted like a child by those things. Humm.
The first factor for me, and now we come back to this idea of creating a tribe and to populate a space and to do a staging, like we do on a painting, a staging of a tribe in a house and my house is like a cloister
that's populated by possessed figures and articulated dolls.
And so those kind of being I got them home, they're in the room, they're there and curiously those characters are people, they help me in my solitude.
These dolls come from Provence Spain, Italy, they come from this huge Mediterranean kingdom, for me Provence is a kingdom and it's a province where the women are really strong.
I lived 21 years on a elevated tray, without electricity and without the comfort that come with it. It was a life of the 18th century.
The level was a house in ruin, that didn't had anything, not a door, not a window, not a floor, not a ceiling, absolutely nothing. And in this house, 22 years ago, along with my ex-girlfriend, we started creating a habitable universe.
It was a physically hard work, I was project manager in this building and what I was making, after selling the rest, I used it for this house, to do something marvelous like a cloister or a little castle.
And I made something out of it. I sometime ask myself, haven't I created a huge doll house?
A theater, where there's a play room in each quiet room where nobody's living, what kind of play room? I don't know. But there's characters that are playing roles and I think that the objects are communicating.
I have this curious feeling that time that happen there is different than mine, but I'm sure there's a permanent play, a mute one perhaps.
The initials rotting almond. The Caucasian knight. The first mother. The bee queen.
(Bunch of made up words)... My glory prevail... The philosophical doubt... Pandora without it's gun... I drawn your tongue like a bow... Mouth shut... The price of the face... Solstice at Babylon... The five fireflies...
...The Angels... The magician student... The Angel of darkness lesson... The blue amazon... The lute player... Artemis in the weaving of the fresco... To know as you go, send the constancy.
I'm an nocturnal being, I can't say night owl because I don't saunters. But I'm waking, I'm a vigil, a night watch, like if I had to protect something.
And I think that I'm the keeper of something, up there, a location, in this huge solitude, and I fall asleep when others wake up, I know they're leaving for work and I can sleep alone.
And in the night I'm evidently, way better off with all those characters who inhabit me, who are absent, but I'll give them life. I need a silence, I also need the dark.
I'd like to live by night all the time. There's way more painter that work at night that we'd think. And I think the story of the north light is a myth. It's not true at all, I do colorful magnificent thing at night. And with barely anything, candles, bad gas lamp.
I live at night behind the moon in a world of good and lovely specter that accompanied me and I see so many things at night
that it's pleasant to rest my eye with human beings in their reality when I see them, I love watching people a lot.
They give me a rest from all those vision, because everywhere there's bodies, everywhere there's faces and heads and I'm actually some kind of majestic slave. But I must obey the will of someone who wants me to paint and write, all according to plans.
I live behind the moon.
An army of women, wearing red iron boots, slowly painting a sign of enemy colors with their luminous bodies.