The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously.
Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), between the paleolithic caves and the uterine night.
Oriol Vilapuig also takes the torch to light without dazzling the images engendered in the cavernous night, and takes the candle to light the frescoes of musty domes.
Exegete of the darkest erotic mystic (Bataille, Klossowski, Quignard himself), he profanes with them the false integrity of the bodies, showing their fissures, tears, dissolutions.
His grammar is made up of the fragment, the quotation, the copy of the copy, the simulacrum as the only way to glimpse some truth (according to Klossowski).
As a careful calligrapher he rewrites phrases from The Tears of Eros or paragraphs from Bataille’s The Eroticism, from Quignard’s Sexual Night, or Klossowski’s Diana’s Bath, he oversizes them to the point that the words acquire plastic quality, while accompanying them with his own drawings that, rather than illustrate, complicate and enrich reading. Erasure marks and deletions erode text and image, thus crumbling the sources.
In these veils, darkening or eclipses lies the metaphorical exercise of unveiling. As if in the gesture of scraping or scratching was revealed hidden grooves of the knowledge mold.
Because in order to feel the nocturnal rapture, it is necessary to obscure the outlines, to tarnish the language, to immerse oneself in the night before memory and to recover the mysteries. Thus the lunar eclipse presides over the anarchic inventory of orgasmic dreams, mystical outbursts, primordial engenderings, which Vilapuig gets back and recomposes as a mental cartography: from the cosmic union between the celestial sphere and the fertile earth, Geb and Nut, to the phallic hierophany which harasses Leda or the deadly theophany suffered by Actaeon.
Vilapuig’s silhouetted line seems to express that chrysalis rupture with which Bataille described the inner break in the erotic experience. But the elation of the Dream (Hypnos) interferes in the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, appeasing the dread that awakens the closeness of the eternal night (so is called death by Quignard).
Reinvent stories about the world, to stage again and again the forbidden image, even if it sink us into the eternal night, spur the artist, the philosopher, the writer: Klossowski will undress again and again the caste Diana before the fascinated eyes of Actaeon; Bataille will establish the origin of eroticism in the paleolithic drawing of a man with erect penis that fades before the bison, and Vilapuig will spin the nocturnal visions of one another and make them converse with his own, inviting us to see what our own night is like from inside.
Anna Adell
–
La nit sexual, Oriol Vilapuig
solo exhibition in Fundació Suñol, Barcelona
until 02.09.2017
.
.