The writing below was part of a proposal I thought to make to the Vatican Library for an exhibition of erotic paintings that I thought I'd like to make as a response to Pope Francis's Encyclical, "Laudato Si". Yes, I am patently insane - but in a creative way . . . a Crazyological way. What in the world was I thinking? Did I really imagine that the Vatican would host an exhibition of surrealistic erotic art?

Somewhere, I heard that the Vatican possesses the largest library of "erotica" - especially antiquarian examples. Whether that be true or not, I think there is a snowball's chance in hell that an exhibition of my erotic paintings would ever be shown at the Vatican. The most worrisome part of the following writings is the fact that I thought expending energy on such a proposal ever had any merit. However, what I have learned is that these tangents are often a stitch in time: What seems to be a frivolous exercise in futility at one time, proves to be the initial stitch that sews together a more consequential tapestry at a later date. Perhaps that is so with 'Erotikon' . . .

From the "EROTIKON" proposal (never sent) to the Vatican Library (??) Or, evidently, as I am gathering from the text, there was an "Encyclical Exhibition" with a call for entries. As of writing (August 2026), I no longer recall the circumstances, but I am sure I never submitted this proposal:

Praise be to life itself! The fabric of life is sexuality. The Earth is one great symphony of the erotic impulse, from the reproductive cycle of the tiniest bacterium to the most sumptuous Parisian Cabaret, all is a mating dance, with all the birds and bees, flowers, trees, fish in the sea, and everything in between expressing the pageantry of 'eros' - the music of life.

The repression of sexuality, a defining characteristic of Christianity, is the unseen cause of the destruction of the earth. To repress sexuality is to repress life, and it follows that the repression of life is the harbinger of death. Frustrated natural desires give way to sinful perversions anger, greed, pride and the expression of these negative feelings ruins not only individual lives, but threatens the entire Earth¹.

In his Encyclical, “Laudato Si”, Pope Francis rightly proclaims that love for the Earth, love for our fellow man, and love for all life that dwells upon the Earth is the solution to the ecological crisis we now face. Love is the answer! However, he does not clearly make the connection between sexual repression, which cripples our capacity to love, and the destructive behavior of mankind. For Francis to make that connection would represent a epochal change in church doctrine more radical to the Church than his clarion call to save the Earth.

David Normal’s, “Erotikon”² is a painter’s response to Pope Francis’s Encyclical. Drawing upon the sexually charged imagery of witchcraft and the demonic in Christian art³, the “Erotikon”, reverses the ancient persecution of eros through a suite of images that celebrate sexuality. The Erotikon holds up a mirror to the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, and challenges the institution to let go of the age old sexual repression that has crippled the human heart, so that we may manifest the love needed to save the Earth from ecological catastrophe.

Erotikon, styled after the classical painting theme, “Bacchanal”⁴, depicts a procession of fantastic beings that are visual amalgamations of myriad life forms⁵. They are portraits of the spirits of nature the imps and faeries that haunt a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Human, animal, vegetable, fungal, mechanical, architectural morphology all interconnect in a phantasmagoric dance of grotesquely beautiful beings combating, conversing and copulating as an expression of the divine spirit of our Mother Earth’s erotic pulse.

My goal in entering the Erotikon in the Encyclical Exhibition is to enter my ideas and images into a public discourse. I had already been considering proposing the Erotikon to the Vatican. Continuing in the vein of working with library materials that has distinguished my recent efforts⁶, I will seek to work with the Vatican Library to access imagery that will become a part of my collage based creative process. The work I present at the Encyclical Exhibition would likely be a part of a larger installation that I hope to present at the Venice Biennale in 2019.

Notes:

1: Indeed, we have recently seen how a pathologically repressed gay man from a repressive Muslim background lost control of the selfhatred welling up inside of him and massacred the innocent patrons of a gay bar in Florida no clearer exposition of the virulent poison of sexual repression need be sought.

2: The name “Erotikon” is taken from a sexological work, “The Erotikon, Being an Illustrated Treasury of Scientific Marvels of Human Sexuality by Dr. Augustin Cabanes, Translated from the French by Robert Meadows, Privately Issued by Falstaff Press, New York, 1933”

3: The imagery of witchcraft and the occult in classical art has long fascinated me. I had the great fortune of attending the Witches and Wicked Bodies exhibition at the British Museum in 2014 and was deeply inspired. For a further acquaintance with this genre of art I refer you to the exhbition catalogue, “Witches and Wicked Bodies, Deanna Petherbridge, National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh, 2013”.

4: A Google image search for “ Bacchanal” provides a reasonable survey of the genre contrasting works of Titian with those of Poussin as well as Greek and Roman temple friezes.

5: These composite grotesqueries are what I term, “Animalgamations”. This is based on my "principle of Animalgamation" that is part of my aesthetic system of Crazyology. The principle identifies the combination of human and nonhuman forms a frequent trope of Surrealist aesthetics as a type of portraiture of the psyche.

6: In 2015 I presented, “Crossroads of Curiosity” , a suite of lightbox murals that were displayed in the Piazza of the British Library at St. Pancras, London. These collage based murals used materials from the digitized collection of antiquarian book illustrations from the British Library.