A partir del próximo mes, el mundo pronto recibirá una invitación para experimentar la vibrante galería del artista sudamericano René Fernando Ortega Villarroel. Quienes se encuentren dentro del área son bienvenidos a asistir a la expo Franterno. Marquen sus calendarios para el 23 de marzo, cuando una exposición de grandes artistas sudamericanos que alteran la mente debutará en Til Til, región metropolitana de Santiago.
Pocos lugares pueden rivalizar con la línea eléctrica orgánica que se encuentra en los entornos naturales surrealistas de Chile. Chile y Sudamérica se convertirán en destinos líderes mundiales para experimentar estados psíquicos surrealistas.
In centuries preceding, during the long, dark night of people passed, the light from the moon was different, they say. Carpet weavers watched sporadic clouds wrestle with thick air as translucent sentiments, ribbed by fleshy coils, pointed fingers at old friends. Tarpaulin Triveni, female, teacher of twenty, payer of Federal taxes, architect of the west winds, lover of afternoons; Route 79 to Tiruvannamalai, rush hour smoke, brimstone, incense, pooja, sudden migrations: the temple, partly stone, partly human –
Tortosa CataloniaMontblanc Catalonia
Astarte! At last, longed the cantaloupe queen, conscious like burned butter afloat in disquietning nodes of boiled heroism, sheer terror written on her bronze armour in longhand Sufic prose, arrows bristling brilliant shafts of light upon those who stand amazed. In showers of liquid lead and riddles like retribution she raises up her head in thunderous paroxysms of wildfire, incinerating the noise of the NASDAQ trading floor via the quietest opening, or tearing into the roaring twenties: like lovers they eat themselves whole. A pain-pointed predilection for killing gods of all sorts, striking them to the ground, howling, shrieking for mercy, but shewing none, misusing the corpse after the kill like orca with a dead seal, or Achilles with Hector’s remains. We play with death. It makes us young.
Tivenys CataloniaTivenys Catalonia
Silver serpents entwine the heart-locket of a young man in Queens. The crepuscular silhouettes of tall buildings all empty, as in a dream, bitter chills in the wind from Hudson’s channel, flashes of red lightning, banshees in the street below setting the dumpster afire. Concrete streets empty and dark, this wraith-like apparition only masquerades as a city: a riddle, an omen, a curse. A picture of petty consequences, catalysing a tuber shaped oath for remedying unlikely afflictions of the psyche, like the pinch of a rubber band wound too tightly around your finger. Entrenched layers of decimal decline pontificate politely to a crowd of mainly young goatherds, but they don’t mind, as any entertainment will suffice for a goatherd of the Bactrian valley, longsuffering in the August Afghan ovenheat, yearning for the cool Hindu Kush. Up there, queens look down from snowy temples, peaks outlined by the monsoon moon, vanished layers of paradise passing instantaneously from view. Instantaneously –
Tivenys Catalonia
Borders bind the wealthy to the poor, but in seaside temples of voluminous concern we count epigrams between sunsets, rallying fractious spirits in the meanwhile, damaging civic furniture installed in the Citibank Plaza. The old guard sits outside the bank on a plastic beach chair, machine gun hanging lazily at his side, smiling cheerfully at the calls of the brain-fever bird stirring raptures in the daytime as if coaxing clams from shells, a child of every man. Now we are ringing the new year by the seven bridges of Königsberg, full of cheap fortified wine and high on super glue, destroying the way of life for those who cannot know better, sweetening a joyous relation between the baroque lintel and its most spiritual rejoinder.
Montblanc CataloniaMontblanc Catalonia
Openings, ruptures and fissures decimate Dorothy Drumwise on her drunk drive through the badlands of Blackpool, BMW unlicensed, DMT fairground flakeout. She sings sweet missives of the Golden Age, of Plutarch, Pindar, and of Ovid. Inclinations of ages move with tectonic twists, first shifting this way, then that way, as with the latest dance fad. I know that you know that the ‘this way and that way’ is a vital mechanism of natural philosophy. The waggledance of industry, the fiesta after the feast, festivals observed on Temple grounds, and with much smoke and incense. Astarte above, chariot rider of fury, smoking halos of pure fire above the heads of gathered postmodernists, crypto-Marxists, and other groups assembled for purposes only spectacle may account for. This terror and delight is for quivering flesh alone: no gods may get a taste –
Tivenys Catalonia
In an asemic New Babylon, an endless plan of a constant architecture, sketch after sketch of alleyways and avenues, flows, interruptions, passages of ludic intrigue: our only concern will be for how the wind goes. The city-gestalt, our new Babylon, is stacked tier-upon-tier as with a Hindu temple, complete with the sombre front of a necropolis, grey and overbearing, the pantheonic structures of dead gods hewn into rock, but haphazardly, without plan or meaning. The Temple of pure, empty worship, accessed via doors which only appear to be doors, words which only appear to be words, each word a door signifying an exit, but only signifying, without being itself –
Kuilapalayam India
The cultivation of ways, sulfurite ligaments imposing reasonable content on expounding gasses, phosphorescent burns blister the torn corners of Lloyd George’s copy of The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, but this will not be a problem for long – at least, not for several centuries. Down in the Centre Pompidou there exists a scale copy of Nieuwenhuys’ Labyrinthe aux échelles mobiles. Parisians drink pastis at 7pm.
Tivenys CataloniaTivenys Catalonia
The matriarchal temple builders of our mother, our lady, notre dame. The swollen, translucent body nurtures a billion babies in complex mythic tunnels underground. Our lady of the temple, founded with mortar and keystone, high Romanesque arches, transverse, ribbed, darkened by smoke of incense that beckons, intoxicates, shines, yet moulds-over quickly. The body of our lady nurtures a repugnant decay where fungi of a million kinds find resplendent consumption. A gentle breeze lifts the spores up and into the forest above, the penthouses, tower blocks, the Gothic quarter below, even the suburbs populated with a thousand empty houses, empty restaurants, empty hotels, emptiness, or so it is reported by La Vanguardia, thumbed in street corners by elderly gentlemen sipping coffee in districts of towering blocks, Brutalist forms, echoes of steel rod construction divining bittersweet sunsets of lackadaisical reform, wilted in margarita sunsets, sugary sensualities disinhibiting bashful dissimulation with the gait and libido of a wild cur, roaming street corners, lurking around the panty drawer, Our Lady intends two-thousand years of certitude for divine discourses on nature, for a thorough study of Deleuze, for a monthslong dance of the wild kind, for carnivals of a schizoid nature, for a Heraclitean passing, and passing, and never returning –
Tivenys CataloniaBarcelona Catalonia
Our retreat towards a porcelain past resides in a turpentine residue of vistas opening above the Sierra Nevada, that pillar supporting the vaulted deep blue sky, the only thing keeping worm-eaten heavens from falling. Remember how we drove there in December of 2018, how the warning signs for ice hazards slowed us for many miles? We sat in the steamy car and drank tea from a flask, ate sandwiches prepared earlier at home, austerity gnawing at the innards. Porcelain does not prevent against cysts. Cysts large as an eyeball, pickled in vinegar solution, stacked on a forgotten shelf in a back room of the British Museum. Perhaps it was Napoleon’s eye? Perhaps it was not?
Tortosa Catalonia
It was I, not Napoleon, who took the moon and put it at the bottom of a lake, littered with the bloated bodies of Englishmen drowned in their re-sprayed Range Rovers. Between velour flaps, cold castellations and raptures coloured like velvet bands at the fair, phalanxes shimmer like desert lizards tussling in the heat of day, the axehead aligns at the very base of the skull to release a thousand demons from their hiding places, demons who vy against one another in their scramble to escape this mind forever, darting this way and that, a confusion of beastly shapes writhing in colours both sapphire and turquoise –
Daniel O’Reilly
Daniel O’Reilly is an independent British author, publisher and internationally exhibited multimedia artist living and writing in rural Catalonia in northern Spain. In 2022 he exhibited stories, photographs and music from the [archipelago] project at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Cairo & Alexandria in Egypt, which will travel to the Andre Breton House in France in 2024. He has recently published short fiction in the Margate Bookie Zine, Trilobite Literary Journal, Tiny Spoon magazine, Writer’s Block magazine, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, the Bengaluru Review, Defunkt Magazine, Everything in Aspic Magazine, Chachalaca Review, The Room Journal of African Surrealism, and Black Flowers Literary Magazine. He is co-creator of The Unstitute, an online art lab and artists’ co-operative, and has screened original video art in competitions and exhibitions in over 20 different countries worldwide.
Levemente palpitas estacionas las palabras en el espanto
Y las cruces llamaradas
Puertas
rasguñan nuestros brotes profundos
Aquí se liberan huesos de los sacerdotes
Los smoking mis placeres atascados por el tractor
Tus dientes
Mi paladar
Tu lengua
Mis amígdalas
Tus fragmentos
Mis encierros en el tropiezo de la senectud
El prisma donde miro paraguas abiertos de la imagen.
Claudia Vila Molina
09-22-1969
Born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago. In 2023 Los Extraviados
Before the dawn of language, when all utterance was Gibberish, words had no meaning; the first racial epithets Were born innocently as ancient spidery cave drawings.
Scratchy jagged lines depicting tiny insulting hand gestures; Flagellum tangents of middle fingers flipped between Protozoa and parasite, bacteria and amoeba—
Dramatic strife of microorganisms mushrooming as Intra species slurs amongst the animal kingdom increased.
The colorful bird of paradise calling a common pigeon A dull grey drone— The majestic king cobra, bold and supercilious, calling The humble garter snake a fraying thread from a bankrupt Farmers’ shirt—
The sleek nimble weasel’s smug indifference to the beauty Of the brindle patterns of big cousin wolverines’ coat— Full of potential for expressive hatred and derisive scorn, Smoldering with bad intent; the early racial epithets long Lay dormant; aging poisons fermenting, Larval words
Clustering into round, red lace doilies; a devil’s needle point.
The forbidden words waiting to be introduced into the Vocabularies of developing homo sapiens. The words Finding their true meaning only after cataclysmic world History played out—rivers of bloodshed flooding 7 continents—casualties of endless wars forming a vast Mass grave of victims and victimizers, reaching beyond Our solar system.
It was then, rising above the transient minutiae of life, The epithets were imbued with power, meaning and Context, having the wide ranging capacity to offend, Cause controversy and discord. The taboo words came of age, and men were struck Dead by lighting bolts of name calling.
Gangs of racial epithets; clusters of rolling red lace doilies Stampede like outlaw bikers or rabid hyenas, across a thin Skinned landscape as vulnerable as a newborn bunny.
The leader of the pack, King Slur, flashy flamboyant, So offensive it can’t be spoken, wears its ugly history Like a badge of honor; King Slur seizes the limelight Having the Alpha status of a fighting word, much Envied by lesser less offensive epithets with fragile Egos.
An epithets’ self worth is determined by frequency of use And maximum offense when spoken. Epithets suffer From neglect when for noble reasons they aren’t in Someones vocabulary.
Pity the wimpy slur, bland as tofu or cottage cheese, Which announces itself with a saccharine greeting Card jingle— Pity the declawed neutered slur, unable to offend, Useless as an old work horse sent to the glue factory—
Pity the obscure, antiquated slur uttered at deaf phantoms In a provincial backwater, not heard and dimly understood By the judgmental ears of a damned civilization—
Beware of epithets that get misconstrued as compliments— Beware of moldy tripe past its expiration date— Beware of sunflower seeds laced with tiny razor blades— Beware of sharks as cuddly as kittens—
If someone calls someone a bad word, and atomic bombs Are dropped all over again, take a vacation and sail to Epithet Isle where a pure slur language is spoken by Litigious masses in perpetual offense collapsing in upon Each other as they speak themselves into oblivion and King Slur is smiling and laughing at them vanish.
“The Hidden Evolution of Racial Epithets” (C) Richard Gessner 2023
Before the onslaught of fat and male pattern baldness, Richard Gessner made front page news during an April snow storm, long ago….
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. Richard wrote The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing Whimsy. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
The Conduit and Other Visionary Tales of Morphing WhimsyAudible
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
Featured photo: Kaulquappen-Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Richard Gessner
Critical commentary on the book “Shuffle poetry” (2020) by Alfonso Peña By Claudia Villa
Reading Alfonso Peña’s “Shuffle poetry” generates many questions, which challenge us as active readers, especially those of us who move through the surrealist texts of all time. Posed in this way, it is a new challenge that is presented to the reader of our texts, which joins the permanence of universal consciousness, the question and answer or the eternal question that dissolves in the chaos of the deepest dreams that we have not finished yet. Fully decipher. In this sense, we ask ourselves: is there or will there be an evolution of surrealism? This movement conceived by Breton mainly, as we know it in its beginnings, in its manifesto. It is a current that has been transformed, thanks to the social, cultural, economic and political crises that have arisen throughout the world. But this does not diminish the creative capacities and active cultural forces, quite the contrary, they are the support to increase the forms of dynamism typical of this style.
The movement that cannot be abstracted from the effects of these crises, which have occurred transversally, both in Europe and now in Latin America, is key and influences (to a greater or lesser extent), which has allowed an enrichment of the surrealist postulates. Mainly, because it allows the reassessment of different optics that come together in artistic elements that move to make notice of the changes and the force that is maintained and spreads like a kaleidoscope in different ways. Therefore, the vision of these artists, poets and writers that is patented in essays, poetry, narrative, photography, painting, literary criticism, among others, constitutes a permanent explosion of meanings that transmute into signifiers to make us see this structure as the game dreamed by the first surrealists, in which dreamlike and now virtual components underlie that cross each of our creations from side to side.
It can be affirmed that the surrealist movement, embedded as I said by permanent elements of modernity, has been reformulating itself, as the exhibitors of “Shuffle poetry” put it and also, it is interesting to understand their gaze as part of the total freedom that assumes each creator when faced with his work. Many also join the cosmic and ancestral call of our Latin American continent to capture in the works the roots of each aboriginal people and the reconnection with their first words, sculptures and the nature of man. This is how the vision of this surrealism, so rich in contents and games, radiates to multiple forms and ways of expression, both plastic, visual and written, which give life to a new surrealist approach, which although it has not stopped beating, as as it was conceived, it now promotes various multifaceted ways to enter into the perspective of reality or non-reality present in our days.
It is also necessary to comment on the expression of transgression that marks the works of the exhibitors in this book, which leads to a permanent need to play and to break the schemes that broadens the concept of freedom in creation. This is a common element that distinguishes these works, which are forged from inner worlds rich in dreamlike and liberating content, where transformation is a permanent axis of universes in constant motion, as represented in different worlds or parallel universes. Creation, in this way, continuously forges and destroys itself, which would constitute the object of its birth and constant evolution: mutations, evolutions, changes of form, content and continent, which are like permanent waves that contribute Surrealist art and its continuous reconstruction.
Another aspect that can be seen in “Shuffle poetry” is the permanent transgression towards social signs formed around a central axis that looks only towards one way of expression, which allows the constant reworking of other signs and other escape routes. towards the liberation of men as social beings who live within a community. The alteration of the meanings, already patented, by a single controlling mechanism, thus generates the ability to alter the represented codes that (on the one hand) are reflected in their own city languages, in addition to the reworking of schemes that are rearranged at any time. order or figure and who want more than anything to find a way of subsistence in the movement typical of the tribe. These forms are appreciated and reconstructed many times, from the collapse of imposed situations that end up being formulated from other varied points of view. So, the ways that surrealist art takes to survive the imposed conceptions are varied, in an attempt to achieve dissimilar points that allow freedom of expression.
Claudia Vila Molina
Writer born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago.
It is then when the tree that tomorrow will summon the thorns loses its leaves, and the bumblebee falls, prey to the polar trails, to reinvent the powerful patient engineering of lytic promises, Well, that’s where I shelter, and where I rescue the omens, there I drink from the Paleozoic salts, which today move the migratory herds, those who come to the eyes without ears, of those attending Sunday services. By nature, I approve!!
They speak of love, and my bet is more on compassion, which is a kind of continuum in a collective warp, of an ineffable equation that they will never understand. Because perhaps love (like that image shown to us) does not exist and if it does exist it is a sum of chemical reactions where a set of hormones stimulates our syntax, and which may also be subject to the need for genes to be perpetuated. Maybe?. But there is also one who breaks this previous theory; crazy love, passionate love, eternal love, etc. that love that becomes unclassifiable. I only know that I know nothing. After all, I believe in love. Does the egg use the chicken to make more eggs? It is possible, but in a global and precisely circular analysis, the plot of existence is supported in a shed crossed by the polyform reality of infinite logics and illogics, where each of its corresponding paradoxes and balances avoids its critical tension. But, we can order them in the not well understood compassion, which could be a feeling deeper than that of the corruptible flesh (physical theory and cognitively plausible), which leads to understandable and celestial simplicity. But what if an infinitesimal were more than an integer, or if that time circulated in all directions? or love will not mean more than a necessary impulse to take risks in order to live the contradictions, so that the soul, when dying, will return with the pertinent knowledge to correct, deconstruct or ratify the whole of the so-called divinity . For this reason, the next step opens the temporality to dedicate more time to essential reflection, and to put aside an imposed competitiveness for the accumulation of objects that lead to the void that means pursuing a way of life that is subordinated to the symbolic relationship. of the object or objects, which is useless and inconducive (a simulacrum of the society of the spectacle) for our true purpose in this brief transit called life. Ars longa vita brevis. Or your existence is just an accident to offer a limited amount of data to accompany the equation that gives additional information to find the way out of the answer. By the way; nobody takes me into account, since my infallibility is very poor since periodically and statistically, my failures are more abundant than my certainties. And therein lies my wisdom; in realizing that my hypotheses are only attempts to find the truth within infinity. To think otherwise would be to err drastically and in the process lie to them. It would be, subjecting myself from the ego to an option to dress elegantly, but in the end, it would strip my limits. It is better to be honest in clumsiness than false in an inane and temporary charade. But: What if love were one of that unknown design in my intrinsic astral writing, waiting for you?
Primordial circulation approaching from a past spring, acrylic on Fabriano paper 250 gm. 35x45cm
So the wide dividing width will unload its useful molecules in this useless impertinent distance there where the lightning reigns without asking for their blind blows. Is when my pale measures they embrace their designs devoid of elytra to save the waters possessed of salt and fire that bathe the limits of my suffering body without entering the first cause that brings me down from within the muscle periphery.
Eros Phasianidae, acrylic and ink on Canson 300 gms paper. 11″ x 8.3
EROS PHASIANIDAE Yo And she saw the chicken rise from the ground a brilliant and ectoplasmic epiphany and she remembered the words of the feathered prophets: “before the primordial egg was the verb” and the pyrrhic evolutionary expedition embraced me so necessary and indeterminate where we are more but under sheds and I saw the grayish uncertainty that shakes my being h = 6.626 0693 (11) x 10 – (34) J. s = 4,135 667 43 (35) x10–(15)eV. s and the beast arose from the miasma without the feminine warmth it was in the offensive of the arches thousands of years ago on the Cartesian line of Har Meggido under the law of y = m x + b and those tears originated at 32°34’59″N 35°10’56″E. II huge old stars leaning out on the horizontal cobblestone sheets were dictated by an ancient manual of glorious epic forms where I did not read the cunning locks and from there lights fall like eagles that are suspended in front of your pale fortifications and despite the fact that I descend without air I cling to the desiccated edges of this abyss turning away from the waves of floral promises with summer mentions that anoint you. Thus the amaranth silence returns to rock the star and like the silent lymph you seek to break beyond the fundamental shell the one that you got to know in a primitive way in the sweet rooms of belief.
Interruption, acrylic on cut Fabriano paper, on black cardboard. 18x24cm. The inclination of one of the elements is voluntary.
GOLDEN VISION
The nothing, the void hold my duplicate fragments (Φ2 = 2.61803398874988…) It is the hollowness of the past and the future what you don’t have and don’t want the illusion of time and line Infinity so love surrounds swelling wisdom while on the musty boards of a camp absent light filters to tilt reciprocal reality that drives your transformation (1/Φ = 0.61803398874988).
Maybe this reality is true on this twilight island where the already worn bones falter by the persistent violet stings, and there is no choice but to live among the cyclones that guard the whimsical and invisible knots with its container meshes that hide half-open portals, those that I will leave like this for a while, since everything circulates in the promised packaging.
I discovered Photomorphosis way back in 1972 while attempting to copy an illustrated article in the Times magazine article on Yves Tanguy on an office copy machine. At night, in the dark. A clandestine maneuver. Photomorphosis is the enchanting process by which an organism changes or experiences metamorphosis under the influence of light… It is a natural process in the realm of photosynthesis, photolysis, etc., indicating the importance of light on living things, akin to shedding light on the darker areas of the mind…
A Wedding in the gardens of Yemen 2021
As an external organic process entering another level of meaning, it became an internal manifestation of an evolving morphology of the psyche. Under the sway of obsessive desire, I combined the words photograph and metamorphosis to signify the photomorphic process, without realizing that such a word already existed.
Salive, Copper and Moonlight
But, further research revealed that photomorphosis was no longer used by the scientific community to denote the organic process of light-induced metamorphosis and had been replaced by photomorphogenesis. Thus, by my investigation, I have given a new meaning to the abandoned word ‘photomorphosis’… by surrealizing it. To paraphrase André Breton: photomorphosis has been given to me to make surrealist use of it. The sustained investigation of the imagination is raised to the level of delirious curiosity, by the introduction of the activity of looking inward to discover, or in effect, to shed light on, the darker areas of the mind. To illuminate becomes a perfect analogy for the photomorphic process… The depths of the imagination open, the fields widen, things become visible… and metamorphosis is inevitable.
Alusofore’s Morning 2021
I drew pictures of strange animals as a kid, tried painting as a teen, and didn’t like the smell of the oils. I did nothing really, until about 19 years old after finding an anthology of French poets… That started my writing – loved surrealist poetry. Poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Eluard. But mainly Andre Breton. He was the most interesting and inventive of them all really. Extremely magical. These days, or more recently, Rene Char (but mainly during his surrealist beginnings). I really like Jacques Dupin (who toyed with surrealism but became even more interested in the realm of language.) I am inspired mainly by Breton’s vantage point in the mind.
We have marvelous weapons
Having abandoned the copy machine at the end of 1999, I discovered that I could do the same thing on the computer and more, using Photoshop, in color, and with more tools…
Armed and Dangerous 2019
Most everything inspires my work. All of which are very much similar to collage. Both visual and textural. A deep synthesis between my writing and my visual works. How I work these days, well, it all stems from my own real-life experiences. However automatic and mostly strange, it’s not art, really, but a further investigation of the psyche… between the real and the imaginary.
The luminous bodies meeting for the first time…
Many years ago, I actually did hear and experience that voice of pure automatism. It startled me completely. I think, once you actually hear and listen to it, it opens a door a little, which stays open, and whenever I feel the urge to write or make imagery, it just comes out. It is believed that one is always dreaming, it’s just under the layer of normal perception of reality. One just stumbles upon it accidentally and feels an inkling, a glimmer of something out of that persistent dream. Like a Deja Vu experience.
Resolution of Pleasure 2019
There are vast differences today between the different countries and their systems of belief with regard to surrealism; not to mention the differences in approach between various groups of surrealism. All this eventually led to the founding of La Belle Inutile and the 6 or so people who had problems with modern surrealism, academia, social groups, etc. Problems to be solved.
written by J Karl Bogartte
The Wedding Guests Have Arrived Cover for Philip Lamantia’s book Becoming Visible
J. Karl Bogartte, born September 8, 1944, of Dutch and Irish descent, is both an artist and poet, schooled in anthropology, photography and various esoteric traditions. He has been an active participant in international surrealism for more than 50 years, and cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions. He presently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bogartte, is both an artist and poet, having published eight books of poetic writings: The Mirror held Up In Darkness, The Wolf House, Secret Games, Luminous Weapons, Primal Numbers, A Curious Night For A Double Eclipse, Auré, The Spindle’s Arc, and Antibodies: A Surrealist Novella. Long aligned with international surrealism, Bogartte is also a cofounder of La Belle Inutile Éditions. His work has appeared in the following anthologies: ANALOGON#65, Melpomene, Hydrolith #1 and #2, La vertèbre et le rossignol #4, Peculiar Mormyrid #2, Paraphilia, Silver Pinion and The Fiend online journal.
When I chose to fill my life with artistic creation… I was only an adolescent. I remember the moment. well, I was 14 years old and felt suddenly consumed by a desire, a need to draw… Since when I have been using all the artistic mediums within my reach: drawing, painting, embroidery, collage. A part of me remains with that adolescent eagerness to discover and create in an artistic sense.
While having attained a certain age, the desire – to live in a world of color and make artistic discoveries – is undiminished. Actually, it is probably even stronger than in my younger years. Following any period of doubt and inactivity I have always returned to my brushes and palette of colors, having a near constant need to express myself without using words.
However, in 2012 everything changed after a phone call from a doctor who told me that I was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease… After getting over the shock I sat myself down (in a wheel chair!) and threw myself into my work, which, as well as coloring my imagination, has since served as a comforting presence and safety valve for my frustrations.
My universe is dominated by color. Whether painting or embroidering, color is always as important as the subject itself. But how to speak more of one’s work? To what genre do I belong?
It has always been difficult for me to answer such questions. I would say that above all I am a figurative artist. But also, no doubt, part of the “outsider” movement.
Nature too has always inspired me. In discovering the artistic potential of embroidery, some subjects have become recurrent: mothers, black Madonna’s, mermaids, Little Red Riding Hood, Frida K.
As an illustrator I also make collages, using torn up pieces from old books, old photos, various fabrics and embroidery, and paintings… All these mediums are thus mixed to bring new life to those lives and faces long since forgotten.
My universe, year on year, is constantly renewed in an exploration of the world of childhood, color, drawings, textiles, embroidery, and painting. I work in the silence of forgotten faces and feelings… repairing and trying to retrieve them, sewing them into re-existence, reclaiming and bringing them back… with delicacy, gently, soaking them in color
When the nose has dyslexia, the conventions of clean and dirty mutate amuck-
Nightmares of being dunked in vats of perfume become the norm-
Social status disintegrates and intimacy with a skunk brings joy-
The man burrows into remote dung heaps further and further away from the tyrannies of soap-
When the nose has dyslexia, predictable roles and behavior are scrambled anew-
Musk entrenched supermen get stampeded by berserk fawns in heat-
Germ-Phobics fondle dung beetles whom with freshly molested vigor, do hind leg roll ups of squeeky clean solid citizens-
A prudish school marm finds a hidden rabid snapping turtle in her soul after being bitten by rotten apples given jaws by the teacher’s pet gone astray-
When the nose has dyslexia, rampant desire surpasses grandiose expectation.
A wart on a baboon’s ass blossoms into a more fragrant-than-thou perfume garden berry infecting a bestial psychopath who then penetrates with valor the furious posteriors of mandrills shimmying with profane delight
Eager vines of algae growing up from centuries of neglected teeth, climb greedily towards the fortune of a fresh breath heiress-
Gooey-Pollyannas wash their mouths out with soap before reciting mantras of bland nicety to contrite career criminals gnawing on clean conscience bunions jutting from angel’s feet-
19 of ClubsTrio of Femme SirensAuf Die SchaukelPhosphorescent Clown SquigglesLucky LimulusBrunette March
When the nose has dyslexia, sacred values of societal dust are sculpted into new poisons by the playful rogue nostril metastasizing-
The Outhouse-Leper becomes a vengeful king, skinning the pillars of communities, turning the hides into outhouse doormats-
Blind Peeping Toms suddenly regain their sight munching on outhouse-doormat brittle–thus seeing and tasting time honored models of proper conduct-
Yeast Infected Vaginas curtsy with hypnotic finesse, flirting with clownish tumescent yam jam giraffes, spurting forth voyeurs turning into martyrs, turning into manic surgeons whittling skunky joy toys in a sleepless scalpel trance-
When the nose has dyslexia, the lightning of childhood memory strikes unlikely victims–oceans of crystallized feelings awaken from deep sleeps re-inventing the heart-
A hardened Loan Shark gets entangled, softened and diced up by the frail sadnesses evoked by the rubbery wet scent of his baby sister’s favorite dolly lost in a distant rainstorm-
A loud mouthed schoolyard bully becomes a mute wise old sage, transcending all utterance, ruminating inwardly, building shrines of cookie crumb folly from the remnants of desserts the bully once coerced from the trembling hands of weaklings entombed in the bowels of forgotten grammar school lunch rooms-
The cold stares of ultra strict baby sitters, soberly stretch a whiny little brat’s dirty diapers into an almighty circus tent tundra sheltering cleaner than clean orphans sired by soap bubbles popping-
Formative Foodchain
When the nose has dyslexia, embarrassment lurks in excess.
The man narrowly escapes the lewd clutches of Germ-Phobics hiding in lairs of undigested corn kernels waiting to leap out and fondle him.
He burrows inexorably deeper into remote dung heaps further and further away from the tyrannies of soap, eventually reaching paradise, where fragrant nirvana is sweetest, and stench lost its voice to the carrion bird who sings dirty in reverse.
The man enters The-Nose-Has-Dyslexia restaurant, ordering a Skunky-Joy-Toy kiss smothered in freshly molested dung beetle sauce.
As frail diced up cubes of sensitive Loan Shark say grace, crowds of manic surgeons saddened by lost wet dollies, serve the meal in a sleepless scalpel trance-
The man tastes paradise, blessed by the voice of stench stolen by the carrion bird who sings dirty in reverse.
Suddenly The-Outhouse-Leper-Turned-Vengeful-King appears, interrupting the man eating, pedantically assailing him with correct table manner etiquette, forcing a squeeky clean knife and fork into his dungy hands…
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
“The Amazing Richard Gessner, Wizard of the word, and Alchemist of the image” -Vincent Czyz May 24, 2022
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
I had the desire to paint and draw very early on but I didn’t practice much because I didn’t have any confidence in myself. I was not attracted by academic drawing, I was self-taught and I did not know how to draw. It took me a long time to find my way, I had to hold on, experiment, let go and everything went better when I understood that I should no longer try to have control but welcome the unexpected and appropriate it. Then began a dialogue with the invisible
Then I use pencils, gouache or pastels to give shape to these presences that appear in the material. For the black and white drawings, they are made with charcoal and black chalk in automatic drawing.
I work with fluid materials to begin with, such as water, ink and watercolor, because these mediums are particularly conducive, as far as I am concerned, to revealing the beyond appearances, they help me to cross borders and to access parallel worlds.
Concerning the cyanotype technique, it is an old photographic printing or reproduction technique, I use it to make multiple prints in limited series of some of my drawings: it consists in putting on a sheet of paper a chemical product which is sensitive to light, one puts on the sheet a negative of the photo which one wishes to reproduce (for me a negative of my drawings which I prepare myself), it is necessary to put it then in the sun a few minutes then to pass the sheet under water and there always appears in blue a reproduction of the drawing drawn from the negative. I particularly appreciate the blue obtained with this technique which is close to the dreamlike world.
My inspiration can come from everyday things, I like to look at where appearances fall and see the magic in a realistic environment. I am for example very inspired by tomato slices, when I cut up tomatoes while preparing food I marvel at what I see inside each slice, I find the tomato particularly inhabited by a wonderful world, hence the origin of my Tomato Heart drawings.
I also made a series of drawings from photos of the surface of the river, these photos were for me like a freeze-frame of a story that the river tells or perhaps this river water is a bearer of memory, that of the countries and times it has crossed? So I drew from these photos to give shape to what I saw appearing.
Nature, women, animals or hybrid creatures, spirituality are the main sources of inspiration for my paintings, all set in a dreamlike universe. As in tales and fables, my drawings try to give us back the sense of wonder and to open doors to a magical world where everything is possible
Mitchell Pluto 