Ben Heine interviewed

by Simon Tripnaux (*)

(The original interview is in French and appeared on Tribords.com
please click here to read it in English, via Google Translator)

Un artiste unique aux images magiques et au travail très, très prolifique A la rencontre de Ben Heine...

Si vous avez le plaisir de jeter quelques yeux au travail de Ben Heine sur son compte Flickr ou que vous le suivez un tant soi peu sur Facebook et ailleurs sur le web, vous découvrirez un artiste aux mille facettes. Une saga visuelle à lui tout seul tant ces travaux sont nombreux, bouillonnants et dans l'air des temps... Interview!

Ben Heine en quelques lignes, c'est quel parcours ? ... et quels futurs?

C’est d’abord un créateur idéaliste qui a envie de partager avec les autres ses idées, son savoir faire artistique et son combat pour diverses causes. C’est depuis ses 12 ans un dessinateur accroc au crayon. Il commence ensuite la peinture grand format à l’âge de 16. Il part pour l’Angleterre à 18 ans et réalise ses premières commissions artistiques. A son retour en Belgique il fait des études de journalisme. Le diplôme en main à 23 ans, il réalise qu’il n’est pas fait pour travailler dans le journalisme à proprement parler mais plutôt dans le dessin de presse.

Inspiré par plusieurs artistes, il s’intéresse soudainement à la photographie et les montages d’images en tout genre. Il se lance quelques années plus tard dans la peinture numérique pour arriver là ou il en est aujourd’hui, c’est à dire un créateur un peu bizarre mais libre, sans règles ni barrières.

Le futur est très incertain, il n’y pense pas, pour lui, seul le moment présent compte. Le fil conducteur au long de ce parcours est la pulsion créative, pour le meilleur et pour le pire.

Peintre, illustrateur, caricaturiste, photographe ... c'est quoi la discipline reine pour toi?

Il n’y a pas vraiment de discipline reine. Pour moi les 2 mots clés rois sont le "travail" et les "résultats" dans le but de transmettre de nouvelles idées, que ce soit à travers la peinture ou la photo. Tout ce que je peux dire avec certitude, c’est que j’adore réaliser des portraits. J’aime rendre hommage aux personnes disparues et leur donner une deuxième vie.

Tu as toute une sphère de fans autour de toi sur le web, c'est quoi qui marche bien sur Internet en matière d'arts visuels?

Tout peut marcher à condition d’être original, d’apporter des concepts nouveaux et de respecter les gens qui nous entourent. Bien sûr il y a des thèmes qui ont plus d’impacts que d’autres. Mais c’est quand on croit le plus en ce qu’on fait qu’on obtient le plus de satisfactions et de retours de la part du public.

Internet c'est un tremplin ou une menace pour les artistes?

Un peu des deux je pense. Le sujet de mon mémoire de fin d'études portait sur les technologies de l'information et de la communication, j'en connais un rayon là dessus. L’internet est devenu une sorte de "conscience collective". Si l’on fait des "erreurs" sur le web, cela finit TOUJOURS par se retourner contre soi. Il faut donc clairement être prudent et essayer de ne pas trop "dévier" des objectifs que l’on se fixe.

Moi j’envisage le web de manière très positive et avec ma vision d’artiste. Je crois que si la toile est utilisée par les créateurs pour partager des idées et des œuvres, c’est un bonus pour tout le monde.

Certaines des images que tu imagines et partage sur le web ont une couleur très évocatrice d'œuvres de Magritte ... une influence chez toi?

J’adore Magritte, je le considère comme un monstre sacré et une influence certaine dans mon travail artistique. J’ai fait 2 portraits de lui. C’est une personne que j’aurais vraiment voulu rencontrer. Toutes proportions gardées, plusieurs de mes peintures et photo-montages pourraient en effet être associées au mouvement surréaliste.

Pas mal de clin d'oeil à Obama dans tous un tas d'images ... c'est qui Obama pour toi?

Je pense qu’Obama incarne un rêve pour une grande partie des Américains et pour beaucoup d’autres personnes dans le reste du monde. Un rêve qui s’est malheureusement peu à peu estompé depuis son élection et son acharnement en Afghanistan.

Mais je reste un fervent admirateur de ce politicien qui a redonné un nouvel espoir, peut-être même un nouveau souffle à la planète en ces temps de crise généralisée. C’est un homme qui semble sincère, c’est rare en politique. Je suis persuadé que l’on parlera encore de lui avec beaucoup de considération lorsqu’il aura quitté la Maison Blanche.

Le surréalisme Belge, mythe ou réalité?

Certainement pas un mythe ! Vu le contexte politique et communautaire plutôt tendu, la Belgique en tant que "pays" est déjà quelque chose de totalement surréaliste. Et puis il y a tellement d’artistes surréalistes de renom qui sont nés ou ont vécu en Belgique, je pense que le surréalisme correspond vraiment bien à notre petit pays.

Une actualité pour toi en ce moment?

Trois actualités en fait…

• Je vais me marier fin juin avec la plus belle femme du monde
• Plusieurs de mes illustrations politiques viennent d’être publiées dans l’ Almanach 2010 du Dessin de Presse, un ouvrage retraçant toute l’actualité mondiale à travers 1000 créations d’une centaine d’artistes. Le livre est disponible dans toutes les bonnes librairies.
• Un nouveau site theartistery.com va bientôt être mis en ligne. Mes créations les plus appréciées y seront mises en vente (à la demande et en séries limitées).

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(*) Simon Tripnaux is writer and webmaster for Buzzistic.com and Tribords.com

Ercan Baysal
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© 2008 - Ben Heine

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Ercan Baysal is
a Turkish artist
living in Izmir.
See some of
his creations
on ToonPool
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The Mystery of Pablo Picasso

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(Ben Heine © Cartoons)
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Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur

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By Martin Ries (*)
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It may be this love is a debt I am paying, due to the destiny of my line, and that Aphrodite is exacting a tribute of me for all my race. Europa - this is the first beginning of our line - was loved of Zeus; a bull's form disguised the god, Pasiphaë, my mother, a victim of the deluded bull, brought forth in travail her reproach and burden.

-Ovid, Heroides

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Art is a human development before it is an aesthetic phenomenon, and Pablo Picasso, the twentieth century metaphysician, autobiographically represents his world translated into a personal aesthetic expression. As a Spaniard it was inevitable that the bull, the bullfight, and eventually the Minotaur, would concern Picasso ("His bulls are real bulls; bulls, not oxen, but wild creatures, vibrant with life and with incalculable strength; proud, courageous animals with ferocious impulses 1/4" - Jamie Sabartés). His early work of the bullfight, however stamped with his personal aesthetic, is straightforward and simple, and indicates no great regard for the bull as a carrier of Europa and Western civilization, nor even as a mythic totem of Spain. These early bullfight scenes are depicted in the same athletic spirit that George Bellows portrayed American boxing matches or George Stubbs presented his magnificent English horses.

André Masson was the first twentieth century artist to turn to the myth of the Minotaur and initiate its resurgence (which may or may not have influenced Jackson Pollock's Pasiphaë much later); at any rate it was Masson and Georges Bataille who suggested Le Minotaure as well as Labyrinthe as titles for Albert Skira's publications. According to Masson he was to illustrate the first cover for Le Minotaure "but Teriade and Skira asked me to let Picasso do it. I did so. I did one myself a couple of years later." [1]

Le Minotaure lasted from 1933 to 1939; Labyrinthe from 1944 to 1946; the catastrophes of Europe, the Great War, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the tremors in Western civilization weighed on men's minds. That Teutonic anti-metaphysician, Oswald Spengler, born a year before Picasso, wrote in The Decline of the West:

Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth 1/4 Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they are - that is the hall-mark of men of race-quality and it is by the being of these men that alone history is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose only between victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victor belongs the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querously and jealously by the side of the events is only literature - written or thought or lived literature - mere truths that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take notice of these propositions.[2]

The Minotaur myth emerged in the arts: Matisse illustrated Henry de Montherland's Pasiphaë: Chant de Minos; Max Ernst's Labyrinth and his Wheel of the Sun both allude to this myth, while his Spanish Physician shows a woman flirtatiously dropping her hankerchief before a minotaur-like figure; Giorgio de Chirico made many versions of sleeping The Soothsayer's Recompense surrounded by labyrinthine colonnades, arches, and facades; and Victor Brauner depicted a

wide-awake Ariadne on conveyance that Ernst Trova could have built for his Falling Man; while Masson continued his variations on the Pasiphaë-Labyrinth-Minotaur idea often greatly influenced by Picasso. Writers, too, treated the West's imprisonment in the maze of the monstrous aftermaths of "The War To End All Wars." Surrealist Michel Leiris' character Aurora (a reference to the Russian cruiser that fired on the Winter Palace ?): " . . . advanced into the labyrinth of phases in which she was her own Ariadne, equipped with the thread of her breathing, so full of intelligence, the median point indeed began to rise, perhaps beneath the secret pressure of the prison's spiral "[3]

André Gide's exquisite Thésée depicted a barbarian adventurer from a new emerging nation vanquishing an over-sophisticated and effete Minoan civilization via seduction and cunning; Jorge Luis Borges wrote a similar account of Theseus, while James Joyce invoked Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is autobiographical, an explorer of unknown arts and deviser of labyrinthine prose. T. S. Eliot referred to the myth in Sweeney Erect, as did Ezra Pound in his Cantos.

Picasso's etchings for Skira's Metamorphosis of Ovid and Lysistrata, a series characterized by classic calm, were followed by the lusty, vibrant and vigorous Minotaurs. None of the depictions of this man-bull chimera tell a known story; they are more a series of Capricios, with the Minotaur reveling with a sculptor (who looks like Zeus), and his model; approaching a sleeping nude, Picasso's sleeping women are often in the pose of the Vatican's Sleeping Ariadne, reclining in a delirious orgy "the first conclusion of the principle of death" - Alfred de Musset, or watched by a beautiful

woman as he sleeps behind a flower-patterned curtain. This is not the terrible monster from Crete but a sympathetic and pampered pet.

On June 12, 1934 , Picasso etched a Tauromachiai with a Europa-like Torera (bare-breasted like the female acrobats of ancient Crete ) draped over a bull. This was followed by a series of Oedipal Minotaurs bereft of creative powers and guided by a "Flower Child".

To the left is an Onlooker, and in the back-ground is a boat with sailors, recalling Theseus' return to Athens after escaping the labyrinth and abandoning Ariadne. Picasso's Minotaur series takes on more serious meaning with the appearance of his Minotauromachia in 1935.

This important etching incorporates elements of the earlier work but, in contrast to most of Picasso's graphics at this time, it is heavily textured, indicating much pentimenti, viz:

the rain cloud, upper right, with the line extending down through the Minotaur's left arm (the etching plate evidently was burnished to erase the line and finally scratched over);

Picasso is always explicit about sex organs, yet obfuscates the Minotaur's genitals here;

there is a difference in scale of the Minotaur's arms and legs, his left leg is similar in distortion to the knee of the Rushing Woman in Guernica ;

there is an unexplained drape (muleta?) to the right of the Minotaur; the lump on the back of the Minotaur's neck could have been a smaller head scratched over to become a large hirsute neck;

the decoration on the Torera's traje de luces changes; her legs and right arm seemed unattached to her body;

the building either extends out into the water beyond the shore, or Picasso did not continue the side down to the earth.

These and many other indications suggest that the Minotauromachia began as another variation of the frolicking brute. Evidently as Picasso was caught up in the more profound implications of the myth he used it as a comment on his times, and that comment reached its culmination with Guernica, that gray icon of life and anti-life.

Monsters are expressions of time out of joint, they are the anithesis of the hero whose weapons are positive powers.[4] Thus the Torera (Europa? Pasiphaë? Ariadne?) in Minotauromachia surrenders her sword to the Minotaur in suicidal gesture. Does this sword become the lance that pierces the horse in Guernica ? Was the Warrior, finally ossified into a fallen and broken statue, originally the vital rider of the horse, a traditional symbol of the unconquerable force of the ego? Like the composed, unmoved Onlookers with their doves of Venus in Minotauromachia, the bull in Guernica presides over the catastrophe aloof from human suffering, not as a symbol of "darkness and depravity" but of the natural forces of the universe, of creativity, fertility and regeneration, existentially unconcerned with moral issues. The bull ("a bull's form disguised the god") is the principle fecundity; the Minotaur ('deluded bull") devouring youths in his pentagon-labyrinth is the perversion of god and man.

Like a comment on the beginning of life and the power of regenerative force, the Rushing Woman of Guernica with the large knee, genuflects before amoebic vegetation while she looks in adoration at the bull (the handkerchief on her head has religious connotations). The horse too seems to kneel before this sprig, yet throws its head back, looking at the bull as though acknowledging a superior power. The horse, always a white mare in Picasso's oeuvre, is the opposite of the aggressive, ferocious and powerful bull; the erotic spasms of death in the afternoon have their sadistic counterpart in the perverted sexuality of the mad orgasms of war. Life may "choose between victory and ruin" but Picasso says Make Love Not War as he elevates symbolism above the level of the personal and places the individual expression of his private emotions within the context of his culture. Carl Jung stated: "Picasso did not deposit in Guernica what he had thought about the world; rather he endeavors to understand the world through the making of Guernica ."[5]

We usually reproach those who talk only of themselves, but this is a burden that Picasso, with his extraordinary depth in poetic intuition, carries to us with fertile and generous metamorphoses and countless illuminations. Picasso reproaches our world for its just pleasures lost, its mis-use of life, its worship of darkness and depravity, death and destruction. Does he sense through the making of Guernica, that Western civilization is declining and coming to an end "due to the destiny of my line" because "Aphrodite is exacting a tribute of me for all my race"?

Man's brief existence in a transitory world contradicts his participation in a world of infinite ideas and meanings. Throughout history, and because of history, man is estranged and displaced from what he essentially is; his apotheosis requires encounters in which new meanings and values ("reproaches and burdens"?) are created. These are expressed in mythic terms, externalizations of our psychic forces and social dilemmas, "because existence resists conceptualization."[6] To open oneself to death is to accept that aspect of "becoming" which is the very stuff of life, and to realize that the human condition can transcend itself and that life, even with "the sacrifices of victory," is the final victor against death's ultimate absurdity. Guernica is an existential resurrection-icon in which Picasso is the officiating but unseen priest.

Friedrich Nietzsche exclaimed of the ancient Greeks: "How much did these people have to suffer to become so beautiful!" In all history no culture has so passionately adored another culture as the West has idolized ancient Greece , not because Greek culture is filled with "mere truths" but because the Greeks, like Picasso, confronted by the chaos of history and the unconscious, moved toward a deepened awareness of life and a cultivation of that awareness.

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NOTES

[1] Letter, 26 June 1967, in answer to questions by the author.

[2] Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols., Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 1947; vol. 2, p.429.

[3] Leiris, Michel. Aurora, Paris: Gallimard, 1946, p.68.

[4] Arnheim, Rudolf. Toward a Psychology of Art, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966, p.256.

[5] Yung, Carl G. Civilization in Transition, tr. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Pantheon Books, N.Y., 1964, p.78.

[6] Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. 127.

This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University, the Brooklyn Campus.

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(*) Martin Ries is painter, printmaker, art historian, art critic and Professor Emeritus at Long Island University.

--> This essay appeared on MartinRies.com

--> Watch also this great video with Picasso (this was sent to me by Ann El Khoury)
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