Le comte Ory / Expectation / The Great God Pan

_{^{“Le comte Ory”, pencil on pink letter paper (A4)}}

This image would need no further comment, if the idea of the comment was merely to describe or amplify that what is shown in the image. What is shown lies on a plane where laughter, sighs, and giggles reign. A poem or song would be better suited to accompany this drawing of the salon or bidet variety.

The artist feels however inclined to add that the scenery depicted has very little to do with the Comte Ory storyline of Verdi’s opera buffa, but is indeed showing members of a dance troupe passing the night in a castle unwillingly offered to them as a shelter for the night by an oddly motivated aristocratic owner, who is torn between his own ingrained hospitality and the knowledge that harm will befall his guests because the castle is also claimed as a hunting ground for young female victims by his vampiric brother, who, being undead, naturally has no legal claim tho the castle, inherited by his surviving brother. The drawing owes its peculiar charm from the fact that it is based quite closely on a still from the Italian Gothic film “L’amante del vampiro” by the otherwise not very well known Renato Polselli. Casting for the film involved Gino Turini who put in part of the money for the film and Hélène Rémy as the film was originally going to be a co-production deal with France. Writer Ernesto Gastaldi once noted that the casting of Tina Gloriani was due to her being the director’s lover at the time. 

This superfluous information hopefully will not serve to diminish the effect of the one pertinent artist’s addition in the form of the hirsute mandrill face of the male protagonist. Male mandrills are of course the most erotically branded animals; they carry their propensity for sex in their brightly marked faces and their firey red behinds, while the intensity of the colours is directly linked to the level of testosterone in their bodies. Note how the two women depicted in this scene allegorically represent the two possible reactions of the opposite sex (unmarked) to such a stark display of sexual interest in the man; either amused curiosity or interest, or concern. Today and to modern audiences, this motif and its reading might seem jejune or ill-advised on the basis of enlightened disdain for traditional gender-based roles in terms of sexual initiative or competition. But this is very anthropocentric thinking. This is more about the (assumed, suggested, claimed) animal nature of things sexual, so closely related also to satanism, ritual, cruelty, neg(oti)ation of civilization and rules of civilized behaviour.

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Way to Work – Strengthening the Links between Active Labour Market Policies and Social Support

_{Way to Work, 9.1 x 12.6 inches, pencil on yellow carton, 2022}

This drawing is the recreation of a drawing from 30 years ago. That drawing was nearly identical in composition, but the figure was fully dressed. While the original was not found, presumably lost or sold, a photocopy still existed, begging in its inferior quality for the undertaking of making a new drawing, a handmade copy of the remembered original, coming as close as possible or even surpassing its original craftspersonship (perfectionism/youthful folly). Actually, even though slightly larger than the original A4, the technical execution is inferior, no doubt due to use of single mechanical pencil with HB mine and tip size 0.3 mm instead of multiple finely and variably sharpened wooden pencils of different grades.

The original clothing of the depicted person was first executed, then, by means of an eraser, removed again, and the nude body reconstructed, to achieve something of an Helmut-Newton effect, with a tint of irony perhaps, as the depicted person is not really the preferred Newton body-type. There was the idea that this could be a sort of nudist yoga teacher, but the muscular tonus is not there, nor the general width of the core which normally results from yoga practice. 

The source of the depicted setting is not clearly remembered. In all probability it was inspired or rendered from a photograph of an architectural decoration project by Victor Vasarely somewhere in France, either a shopping centre or university campus.

The following is a non-realized passage concerning dress codes and where nudism would or could be placed on a scale between “casual” and “formal”. 

Please observe the extant photocopy of the 1994 original:

First version (copy) “The second Idyl” A4,  ~1993

Drawing and text © 2052 by Torsten Slama and the SHY Laboratory Group

Mannaheim Progressive Pro-Choice Clinic

Woman’s Medical Centre with 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar (Oils on canvas on wood, 50,3 x 62,8cm)

Photographic reproduction of a painting which is positioned  somewhere on the borderline demarcating the difference between the entirely satisfactory with added interest, and one of the lesser efforts in the field of true painting. Due to experiments with the preparation and priming of the canvas, the behavior of the paint was unexpected. Thus the execution lacks fluency. The technically inferior quality of the photographic reproduction adds to the impression of a very strange atmosphere permeating the picture, ambiguously oscillating between  moodiness and objectivism. The symbolism; moon, spiral, car, and brick, is rather balanced, but with the addition of some sea shells, it is clearly shifted into the realm of female reproduction. (Of course, this is based on highly untrustworthy  assessments of gender-classification of objects. Ed.)

The building does, or at least did, actually exist, somewhere on the British Islands. The photocopy of a photograph of the building from a book on Brutalist architecture garnered at the Düsseldorf Central Library some 25 years ago exists, yet, due to negligence, lacks any inscription for further contextual elucidation of the source. So neither information on the architect nor the actual location of this interestingly proportioned edifice can be provided, much to this author’s disgust.

This painting is based on that drawing. Drawing is finer, possibly more accomplished. Yet the painting adds something. Mostly it adds the je-ne-sais-quoi. Painting and explanatory note © 2021 by Torsten Slama and the International Pro-Brick Society IPB

Women’s Medical Centre with First Motor Driven Vehicle

Women’s Medical Centre with 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen by Rheinische Gasmotorenfabrik Benz & Cie. (Pencil, coloured pencil, acrylics, shellack. A3, 2013)

Depicted is a medical centre exclusively for women, offering medical treatment for diseases of the female genital apparatus and applications of advanced pro-choice technology. The Benz three-wheeler parked in front of the clinic is a permanent installation reminding of a period where men were still relatively unchallenged in their claim over the field of artificial invention, as opposed to “natural” creation, the female secret, Bachofen’s swampland of unlimited fertility.

The staff of the medical centre elected to dedicate their institute to the renowned Scottish electrical engineer and laser scientist A. Catrina Bryce. The official designation for the institute is thus: Women’s Medical Centre “Ann Catrina Bryce”. A schematized, floating model of the laser was chosen as the sign of the centre, at night emitting a beam searching the night sky, reminding the nearby female population of the fact that now women are in control of phallic technology, putting it to empowering pro-choice use in advanced abortion procedures and the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) laser beams to vaporize abnormal cervical tissue. The spiral shape of the laser emitting beacon refers to one of the oldest symbols concerning everything anti-phallic, also alludes to contraception via Intrauterine-System (IUS), or Hormonic Coil.Illustrative sketch and explanatory note © 2013 by Torsten Slama