BRASSAÏ, " Galatée ", 1971, Carrara Marble, 50 x 20 x 10 cm
With a selection of artworks from :
Louise BOURGEOIS /BRASSAÏ / Raoul DUFY / James ENSOR /Marcel GROMAIRE / Alfred-Auguste JANNIOT / Wang KEPING / Yves KLEIN / Jeff KOONS / Jean METZINGER / Man RAY / Bettina RHEIMS / Mimmo ROTELLA
« This taste for the Beautiful, this metaphysical sense is a sixth sense,
of which the ineffable price for many minds is merely a problematic being ».
Anonymous
A Muse in art triggers an erotic spark and a sort of alchemy in the artist to whom she attaches herself, which in turn enables the artist to realise their true potential. Hence her presence in art which is generally a representation of an idealized woman, endowed with beauty and creativity and exercising an irresistible attraction, akin to artistic allusions to Venus. Pre-eminent in beauty as well as in sexual love, the presence of Venus also triggers a meditation of the aesthetic order.
However, the relation between the Muses and Venus is less obvious than it seems. It is simplistic, you could say, to see Venus as a muse or to link the Muses to the realm of Venus. The paradoxical relationship between these two concepts does not reduce their abstract power, on the contrary; it attests to their vital energy which always carries a potentiality of becoming. The Muse is first of all time and the crystal of memory and fantasy. This mnemonic side of the Muse has a special life, a survival around Venus. The spiritual internalization of the Muse goes with the externalization of Venus. Hence the dilemma of the work which acts half way between corporal sensuality and sacred emotion. Their challenge comes from an immemorial fixation of the simple discernible appearance; the Muses and Venus are the pure and obscure necessity to the artist.
Although, under the sign of Venus, the Muses do not escape from a love poem and lead a parallel existence, each in her unique way, Venus cannot be the spark without passing through the multiplication of her identity in the plurality of the Muses. Alternating between liminal and fatal, between light and dark, between deceptive and epiphanic, between Venus and Muse, Vemuse emerges with various appearances that artists have assigned her over time. Vemuse animates and feeds this secret fire which inhabits artists by allowing them to go beyond themselves, to seek, within the confines of creation, secret connections that form links in their intimacy with the object. Vemuse thus allows eroticism to be celebrated by the artist’s potential to reconfigure the relationship between beauty, truth and incarnation. This is the reason why Vemuse is shared between absolute destiny and the irreducibly sensitive manifestation of this same destiny. The alliance that is both expected and unexpected that generates a third meaning.
Buket Ates
Translated by Jane MacAvock
