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.