“And the Beast which I Saw”
"And four great beasts were coming up from the sea, different from one another. "The first was like a lion and had the wings of an eagle. I kept looking until its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man; a human mind also was given to it. And behold, another beast, a second one, resembling a bear. And it was raised up on one side, and three ribs were in its mouth between its teeth; and thus they said to it, 'Arise, devour much meat! After this I kept looking, and behold, another one, like a leopard, which had on its back four wings of a bird; the beast also had four heads, and dominion was given to it. After this I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrifying.”
And the Beast which I saw
And the beast which I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like those of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion and the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. Revelation 13:2
And the Beast which I saw is a series of works that takes its inspiration from a variety of apparently incongruous sources; the bacchanalian scenes of excess so ubiquitous to Baroque era art, antique ‘erotica’ of the C17th, Assyrian relief sculpture and our own era of extreme and catastrophic consumption.
Headless bodies lost in egotistic lust and self-obsession crush into one another, tangled limbs and copulating figures metamorphose into beasts, sprout fur, grow hooves and horns, unaware of their own creeping metamorphosis. Figures tangle, draping across ornate furniture, cushioned by luxurious trappings, lost and vulnerable in imagined landscapes and dense jungles where spectral beasts prowl, threatening to consume them unawares. Images of transparent Lions, Snakes, Bears and the she-goat stalk across the bodies, their illustrative lines juxtaposing harshly with the highly modeled flesh of the figures.
These works suggest not only a strong relationship between what we consider historically ‘erotic’ (read ‘acceptable/artistic’) and what we consider to be ‘pornographic’, but they also stand as a powerful allegory for the human condition. Considerations about climate change, the ravaged natural world and the fast disappearing ‘ethnosphere’ are questions which surely are never far from the minds of our generation. These works act as an allegory for our current state of being- a species lost to its own hedonistic self-absorbance, sleepwalking to the edge of an irretrievable precipice, unable to touch or even witness the chaos of the natural world, close enough to touch.
