Battling Demons

"And when the barrator had disappeared, he turned his talons upon his companion and grappled with him right above the moat. But sooth the other was a doughty sparhawk. To clapperclaw him well and both of them fell in the middle of the boiling pond"

Dante-Divine comedy-Inferno: Canto XXII

Dante had been expelled from his native Florence by the time he wrote his magnum opus. Battle worn from the conflict with the Ghibelline’s in Campaldino, betrayed and exiled following his rift with the Papacy, and heart sick following the death of his unrequited beloved-Beatrice, the long descent through the circles of Hell must have seemed like a refreshing morning stroll by comparison.

No such reprieve from the hell and damnation that has been this year unfortunately. Pandemic still hanging like a biblical pall, while the straitjacket of institutional racism becomes torn at the fabric of Americas seams. Hardly surprising and frankly-long overdue, given the four hundred millennia that includes a legacy of human chattel, lynchings,segregation and injustice.  Add the imperfect storm of endless black by blue murders, and four rancorous years of ear bleeding dog whistles, and we find the median that was Junes gloom, drowning in it’s inevitable, turbulent, flood. 

 So there’s a lot of that informing this latest piece, the Inferno’s battling demons-Calcabrina and Alchin-talons drawn and teeth barred as they fall into the seething black pitch-a ready made conflict that conjured for me at least, not only the fractured divide between the white Guelph’s and black Guelph’s that vexed Dante’s era, but the racial one that has spanned from the Mauritanians in Visigoth’s Europa, the riots in my native Toxteth back in 82, through to present day America.

Along with it, my own redress to not fall on the sword of only ‘paint what you know”, because broadening ones palette should always extend literally, if we are to confront the white demons of our own.

Hell is truth seen too late.

What a week ,eh?  A week in which it seems the world has gone utterly barking mad. In the proliferation of editorials and post-mortems it’s hard not to cast this period as America’s final obituary. Hard not to fear the cataclysms and horrors the future holds. Hard not to see the dark specters in the hard lessons of history. Hard not to feel like Nietzsche’s crazed ragman, raging at the sky.

All too easy in fact, in a blighted year that has already been so fucking wretched.

As an artist particularly, its all too easy to retreat to escapism and impartiality, after all-I’ve heard it said that “being divisive, is bad for business old boy”.

Except I see nothing but complicity in silence.

Art-NOW more than ever- has a responsibility to turn a mirror on the unraveling shit storm that will prevail over the coming years. And it may be the only democratizer and means of expression left to those who may fear retaliation for speaking out.

And I will do my bit, as I always have to put my brush where uncomfortable truths lie.

To that end, there is my new series, a direct follow on from Purgatorium, called Paradiso-Edens Fall,a title that may give something of an insight into my dark intent.

Then there is the bridge piece between the two, “Leviathan”-(pictured above) which takes its title from Thomas Hobbes book of the same name.

I shall also be making an announcement about a piece which shall be showing at Gregorio Escalante’s wonderful basement gallery shortly.

To quote Hobbes-“Hell is truth seen too late.” , and for me there is no more critical time but now to tell it.

War by David Van Gough

 

War, may have been etched in Charlies black heart, and in the Swastika on his forehead but it was Tex who got to do the crafty work on the plump gut of Leno LaBianca. 

The war Manson hatched was black against white, but in the bloody epitaph of each letter lay seeds of a light and darkness battle, beyond the color of skin. 

It was branded there in the lines of the slashed W, ascending and descending to form the square and compass of Freemasonry. 

It was there in the anarchist A, and the occult numerical values of the R: 6+6+6. It was there buried in the word reconstituted as the alchemical symbol for the Hermetic cross and its directive "As above, so below"
 

And it was there resonant in the Eastern mysticism's and ancient Hindu deities that informed the era-Kali with arms like a decade of blood spattered tendrils brandishing tools of death, along with Lennon's decapitated head, hanging like a semaphore on the love and peace generation forever.

War-that's what it was good for.

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am