This was taken, like I said, from The Huffington post.
By Kisa Lala For The Huffington post
© Ray Caesar, Revelation, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC
It had taken months of trying before I finally met with reclusive artist Ray Caesar, just before his new show opened at New York's Jonathan Levine gallery. I found him to be a pleasant, soft-spoken gentleman, surprisingly forthcoming about his troubled past and the process of healing that his art represents.
Caesar renders art using 3D software with movable appendages operable in a virtual world, sometimes scanning his or his wife Jane's skin from the area below the eyes and eyebrows, giving his creatures a sanguine, sentient appearance. He is their Pygmalion but through their 'autonomous' anatomies they ascend as rulers of their domain. Caesar, whose name connotes emperor, is also the root for caesarean, and according to mythic tradition, Julius Caesar was the first to be delivered in such fashion by a midwife. Childbirth can be viewed as eruptive and emergent, painful but cathartic; the generating host can be consumed by the process. Caesar's art is his progeny but also the instrument of his healing.
© Ray Caesar, Back Birth, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC
A resident of Toronto now, Caesar grew up in a troubled household in the tricky suburbs of South London near Brixton. The tiny wallpapered, Victorian residences from the early 1800s form the nostalgic backgrounds for many of his paintings. "I remember an area behind my father's chairs, where I used to peel the wallpapers away," he recalls.
His artistic influences though are much wider, referencing the French rococo period, the fête galante, Antoine Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, the period of Dutch paintings - Vermeer, the Regency in England, "all the painters from where you see all the escalation in art," elaborates Casear, "like early American paintings; and fashion from the 1950s and 1960s; when I was growing up that was what people were wearing."
I had deduced a Japanese element to his work, and he explained that when he was fifteen his future father-in-law, who had survived seven years of prison camp in Siberia, had introduced him to the works of Yukio Mishima and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, writers that touched upon bushido, the samurai ethic, balancing the cultivation of beauty with discipline.
Caesar also cites writers Anita Brookner, Jane Austen as influences, telling me he had read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird countless times. Recently he had been clinically diagnosed with disassociative identity disorder, and therapy had revealed the greater impact of Lee's book.
"The whole realm of To Kill a Mocking Bird started to play out in my mind as ways I would disassociate parts of myself," says Caesar. "The children were one part, the perfect father was Atticus Finch, the grown up man who had no voice was Boo. All these characters played out in my work. For many years for me, there was no voice. Art was the light speaking about the troubles that I was dealing with. Two children see the world as they have never seen before, the world of hate."
Caesar liked to play with dolls, which used to infuriate his father, and though he was left alone to draw, he repressed that side of himself that wished to be more vocal. Later in life, he would work for seventeen years in a children's hospital, and the physical wounds he would witness that were inflicted on the children and their powerlessness to protect themselves, would have a profound effect on his own expression.
I tell him that having access to multiple personalities could be considered more a gift than a disorder. "It actually has been a gift," says Casear, "as a child it was an excellent way of dealing with things, if you were in a situation and you didn't like it, you could close your eyes, go off into somewhere else, and say, for now logic and reason makes no sense to have it... I'm in an insane situation, so I will disassociate myself from logic and reason. I will just accept the world is insane. It is a safety."
Ray Caesar, Back Birth - Side Saddle, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery
Because of his frequent anxiety attacks Caesar had undergone therapy, which helped him unravel elements of his personality affected by his childhood upbringing. He tells me, "One disassociative part of myself is the part that is allowed to say, No."
"As a child I used to stand in line-ups with my father who used to scream at people, and I had so much anxiety over that I could either live with the anxiety as a child or disassociate from myself. [If I was at a] super-market with my dad, and he was screaming, I would take that part of myself and tuck it away. And soon as I did it once, I did it over and over again, until later on in life there are all these disassociative parts of oneself."
Logic and reason became personified into Castro and Pollux, "two northern uncles." Castro and Pollux, also known as the Dioscuri, are seen sometimes as St. Elmo's Fire by sailors, and are the patron saints of lost ships at sea. Pollux means polluted, and Castor means clean, reflecting the two conflicting sides of himself; the tattoos of one are mirrored in the scars of the other. Caesar uses many nautical references in his work that allude to suspension, being cast out at sea, falling, birthing, and like the archetype of the Hanged Man, an intermediate state of being.
© Ray Caesar, Castor, 2005, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC
Pollux, 2005, © Ray Caesar, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC
KL: I imagine there was a spiritual aspect to these 'guardians' that therapy may have discounted. Sometimes life itself is a barrier to connecting to other worlds - and maybe a bridge is only possible through the subconscious, which is also the source of our creativity.
RC: I believe so; I had a lot of therapy for it... But when I questioned them, they did say once, that both [points of view] could be right. I think ...that life is not a closed sphere. There is an opening like the top of a cup. And these voices are a part of you and a part of something else, and you become aware of the difference between 'lower entities' and the 'higher entities'. There is a hierarchy in everybody.
We all have panic, depression, anxiety, its just called a disorder when we have too much of it. Disassociation is a human skill. We can walk into a situation and you can say I am not going to be angry, I'm going to put my anger away, just as a child I did it too much, and forgot that I was doing it.
KL: The rooms look inhabited in your paintings.
RC: The rooms exist in a virtual world. Just like each of us carry memories whether of this life or beyond or of another world. There are drawers in cabinets in which I place letters. I lost my mother and sister years ago, and so I have lockets with their pictures in them and it means something to me that they are there, even though you can't see it in the picture all the time.
KL: You used to bury things in the garden when you were a boy.
RC: There was an obsession with doing this. And I didn't realize until I took therapy that's what I was doing with parts of my personality. Burying them, putting them there, so they are safe, so nothing could touch them.
KL: Maybe burning is cathartic? It exorcises the things lodged in your head.
RC: Certainly, if this was causing me a lot of trouble or stress. There was an incident while I was working in the children's hospital, in which I saw a picture of a child who was murdered. And I couldn't get that out of my head. Actually after I saw that particular picture I quit the hospital maybe 3 weeks later; I was really coming apart.
I started drawing a lot of pictures of it, and started tucking it away and burning them. Things were safe if they were burned because no one could touch them again. Years later I did a piece called Bride, it was of a girl who lost her head and I decided to sew it back on. The young murder victim that I saw in the hospital had something to do with that image. She was strangled; her neck was crushed to a point where it was all caved in.
© Ray Caesar, Bride, Courtesy of Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC
KL: Does it bring it all back - when you look at these pictures again of her you've created?
RC: I have tried to create a place where she is put back together, where she is safe.
KL: She has power now and she's come back with a vengeance. She's got teeth.
RC: Exactly, no one can do that to her again. Your subconscious tries to deal with that. We call them disorders but they are natural ways for the mind to protect itself.
