Flesh of the world- 2016/18

In 2016 I started recognizing that the quality of flesh that I had been exploring, was also a quality found in  nature. This was the result of daily trips to the forests of the Ipirus region. What caught my interest were especially trees and fungi developing on them.
I drew and painted these natural bodies, approaching them in the same way as I approached my own flesh.  This was the start of my work on the connection of the body and nature, something that has come to interest me more and more. A view of nature as bodily flesh, and the body as an extension of nature.
Since then I have been aquainted with the phenomenology of Maurice Merlau Ponty, and his final work 'The Visible and the Invisible'. Also with the writings of David Abram and Suzi Gablik. I was so happy to find a connection of my thinking to these approaches to the world and art, bringing me before the realization that  my work had a strong link to contemporary ecological thinking.
Ever since my first studies in Social Psychology, my work has been about going beyond the dualistic dichotomies between e.g. the self and the world, the human body and nature that have dominated the worldview of our Western culture. Exploring and revealing the fundamental unity of the human being and the natural world is the basis of my recent work and the start of a new period.
As Suzi Gablik says, relationship is the key insight of ecology.
Here are some examples of this  work, from 2016

The Fall (After Rubens) 2016, Soft Pastel on paper

Unknown pleasures, 2016 Soft pastel on paper 70x100cm

Inferno, 2017 Soft pastel on paper, 87x125 cm

Attachment, 2016 Soft pastel on paper, 1x1.5m

Flesh in the Baroque

The subject of flesh is dominant in the Baroque, where voluptous bodies or cascades of bodies and cloth create endless  folds.

I  see the baroque as the demand and desire of the flesh, or matter, to represent itself and expand into space. The Baroque celebrates the 'Flesh of the World'. It predates Merlau Ponty's vision of 'Flesh as a choreography between the flesh of the world and the flesh of the body'.
According to Giles Deleuze, writing in 'The Fold' about the Baroque,  'the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space'

The Baroque is movement, and this is why it interests me. 
Moving away from the idealism of the Renaissance it is more related to life and the turbulence and change it entails. 
It is closer to my experience of my insides, my doubts, my desires. 
The Baroque characterises a period of change and instability itself. So form communicates with reality. 

A characteristic of the Baroque is excess. It is the excess of flesh that demands to assert its own self. Art moving closer and closer to life instead of an ideal representation of it. 
The Baroque builds on the depth of pictorial space created by the Renaissance but adds to it the dimension of forwards. It is thus that its pulsating surface moves outwards to real space. 

In the development of my recent work I have been inspired especially by the work of Rubens. And especially by the painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels. This painting for me represents at the same time the joy of experiencing flesh and the pain and suffering its breaking free entails. 

Rubens, The Fall of the Rebel Angels

Study for the Fall

The Ecstasy of St. Teresa

Carravaggio

Fontanta di Trevi