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ArtistI have always been interested in a certain creative process. It starts out with a lot of black; the proportions are not the 1.6 ratio—this generates monsters. It creates a monster, from Latin monstrum, “omen, portent,” from monere, “to warn”—a creature that reveals or warns. But then, as always, I rework it, and the creature evolves. The black moves from green to indigo, pink, then to a standard palette like turquoise, orange, and chartreuse. The proportions shift toward the golden section. More creatures appear, as if by portent, and a narrative evolves from a dark vision, and voilà—what was once disturbing is still disturbing, but no one quite knows why, because it is all so beautiful. And this was all born from the dark womb grotto of the grotesque, whose niche is covered with the ugly precursors of all this beauty.
I have long courted a peculiar genesis of form, wherein the mind, plunged into an abyss of blackness, forsakes all harmonious measure. The sacred proportion—so often enthroned as the quiet law of beauty—is here denied, and in its absence the monstrous takes breath. From this darkness there stirs the monstrum, that ancient omen, born of warning, a figure not merely seen but felt, as if summoned from some subterranean tribunal of the soul.
At first it crouches, misshapen and defiant, its limbs unruled by number, its countenance an affront to reason. Yet I return to it, again and again, compelled by an obscure necessity. I alter, I disturb, I coax it forward. In this act of reworking, the creature does not vanish—it transmutes. The black begins to loosen its grip, admitting tinctures of green, then a deeper indigo, then the unsettling bloom of pink, until at last it yields to a more lucid harmony: turquoise, orange, chartreuse—colors that seem almost to redeem what they adorn.
And with this shift, proportion itself inclines toward order, bending subtly toward the golden law, as though beauty, long exiled, reasserts its dominion. Yet the creatures multiply. They gather like portents across a widening stage, each bearing the residue of that first darkness. A narrative unfolds—not declared, but insinuated—emerging from the depths like a dream that refuses daylight yet insists upon meaning.
What was once grotesque remains so, but its terror is veiled. It is now clothed in splendor, radiant and inscrutable. One gazes and is seized—not by horror alone, but by a troubled admiration. For the grotesque, in its cavernous womb, has wrought this transformation. Its niche, crowded with the malformed and the abject, proves itself the very crucible of beauty. From deformity, revelation; from shadow, a brilliance that unsettles precisely because it enchants.
