The Right Man

_{^{The Right Man (pencil, pastel on pink tone paper, A4)}}

This drawing, like any other drawing, perhaps needs no introductory or explanatory words. An association might be noted here: the depicted situation seems thematically linked to a surrealist distortion of a dinner scene in the Luis Buñuel film, “The Phantom of Liberty”. Social interaction at the dinner table is linked to waste disposal, which means defecating together, the act of eating is an isolated act, like in contemporary western civilization the act of going to the toilet, with special architectural arrangements guaranteeing privacy (the cell, the cubicle, an enclosed space, closet, Klosett). Depicted here is a man sized cubicle designed for the man to privately emanate his masculine sense of power or perhaps also secretly admire or masturbate his private part under the nice slab of marble designed for him to rest his big hands on (hand depiction inspired by a description of the hands of Hermann Göring, as manicured hairy paws, by the German author Carl Haensel in his book “Der Nürnberger Prozeß, Tagebuch eines Verteidigers”. The depicted person is not Hermann Göring though, but the largely forgotten German actor Paul Hartmann, an interesting name, like Paul Toughman.

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Above the Law / Investigator K-9

^{Police Investigator K-9, pencil, coloured pencil on pink tone paper, A4 (210 x 297 mm / 8.3 x 11.7 inches)}

This drawing is based on a film still from the 1988 Steven Seagal vehicle “Above the Law”. He is striking a somewhat striking posture with a manly thumb hooked under the belt of his blue jeans, and a very interesting way of holding the handset of a public telephone while leaning against its sturdy metal body, tagged in a very haphazard fashion with various names, among them, standing out due to size and color, the name “Aline”. Also featured, a star of Betlehem.

Although largely done in pencil a few highlights are added in the colours blue and red. Steven Seagal’s head is replaced with that of a German Shepherd – the idea of making the head of a male protagonist a beast’s head is of course epitomized in various illustrations to the story, The Beauty and the Beast. The idea is to underscore the fact that manliness, especially its sexual aspects, expresses itself best in animal attributes, the whole world of masculine sexuality being anti-social, anti-civilization, etc., and the reality of the sexual act being a bloody business with death as an end result (see also, the wolf man).

General impression of blotchiness of the reproduction comes from discoloration, curliness or waviness of paper, stemming from excess humidity, water damage, hand grease. The paper used is of extreme thinness, like letter paper.

Artwork © 2057 by Torsten Slama

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.