"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and
rational disorganization of all the senses. All the forms of love, of
suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts all the
poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Unspeakable
torment where he needs the greatest faith, a superhuman strength,
where be becomes, above all others, the great invalid, the great
criminal, the great accursed, - and the Supreme Scientist! - For he
arrives at the unknown ! Because he has cultivated his soul, already
rich, more than anyone else! He attains the unknown, and if,
demented, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, he will
at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his flight
through the unheard-of and unnameable things: other horrible
workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the other
has fallen!"
Rimbaud, Letter of the Visionary
"I is another" is a quote French poet Rimbaud's famous "Letter of the visionary" in which he develops a conception of the poet as a seer, an explorer of the invisible depth of the mind and reality, at the risk of falling into madness.
I intend to transfer that conception to the painter. The central figure has eyes turned inward like seers. She sees the invisible, and she mediates between my daylight self with genuine eyes lost in the distance (in case you didn't recognize it was my face of both sides) and my shadowy self, awakened, defying the viewer with a straight gaze.
Besides, there's a meta reflection as well about my own art making, which in the final analysis, is much more the expression of my shadow self than of my daylight consciousness.
