Memories of a body incomplete.
David Clegg, Londra, maggio 2006

I've always found these works difficult to classify. They're somehow easier to write around rather than about. I've always thought that there was something darker behind the aesthetic sophistication, a razor blade concealed in fine linen. Some appear to allude to a chemical or thermal transformation. Something cosmological, concealed energies and dark matter. It's difficult to pin down but sometimes in London one finds odd burnt patches on pathways and more secluded pavements; rippled and congealed pools of tar and ash containing the charred remains of items of clothing or shoes. They seem to be the result of a person at such a location being subject to an intense discharge of energy such as a lightning strike, or possibly an unknown method of transportation or vaporisation. To be witness to such an event or to survive it would, I'm sure, appear to be the act of a vengeful God.

The body from the inside.
The explosion seemed like years ago. He'd been staring for so long at the flaming redness on the inside of his eyelids that it seemed he'd forgotten he was still part of any bigger world. He awoke a little more to a faint burning sensation like a flickering red inner light in his gullet. Fine thermographic sensors around the bed traced the many unseen forms of energy surrounding and affecting him. He'd rested more fitfully recently with the persistent feeling that an agitated animal was nestling in his gut. His breath had the sour smell and taste of smoke and bile. His stomach burned with the harsh acidic flash of cathode rays. The day would begin and end in the dark. His surface began glowing as electrical impulses crisscrossed his new skin, the whirring pumps and siphons pushing blood through empty capillaries below its surface. The pallid colour of coma was flushed out as the exposed spaces between the new artificial body walls began to glow with painful remembered heat. His sinuses clearing dust and sand with a rush of cold water followed by hotter and hotter blasts running through his septum. Steam and humidity filled his lungs as internal liquids reached a rolling boil. His iridescent new skin shone with leaden dull reflections. It would be several hours before the sun rose. Until then, murmuring with the sounds of an awakening nervous system, he would twitch and sweat in his bed, cooling from the inside out. His body from the outside blackened completely, unhuman, a mass of scars, angles and rotundities, quivering prominences and lubricated hollows.

The body from the outside.
Each of these works represents a view of the body. For hundred of years artists and priests have colluded in the fallacy that reads the appearance of the temporal body as a reflection on the quality of the soul. From El Greco's gravity defying angels to Saint Theresa of Lisieux's, porcelain white skin, both are said to be reflections of an other worldly inner purity. In this association it seems that these rippled white surfaces reminiscent of brain tissue and intestines could represent the physical interior of the saint. The empty shell of skin after the soul has departed. A saint turned inside out.
The surface of the skin has often held magical associations. Buddhist monks burn the skin of their scalps with tiny pyres of incense, the flagellant and the Aztec both chastise and cut their skin with cactus spines and obsidian blades, the saint's skin remains smugly intact after death (although in truth it's merely transformed to a fatty grave wax). It hides their polluting and oozing innards allowing the deceit that the heart is the seat of love, religious devotion and courage rather than the pulsing and oozing organ it is. Our skin protects us from blades and broken glass and seals within innumerable unpleasant sights and smells. It shirks from contact with poisons and stings. It allows us to be both part of the world and retain a separate identity, just as a vortex in a glass of water remains part of the liquid but distinct from it. Removing all or part of the skin as a form of torture or execution is goes back centuries and still continues'.
Blemishes written on the surface of the skin whether by disease or injury have come to be understood as reflections on the immoral condition of the insides, leprosy and syphilis like aids today were thought of as sinful afflictions. To voluntarily defile, burn, pierce or flay the skin is seen by western eyes as a gross perversion that only blind faith justifies. Religion has always driven some to see their body as a dead weight obstructing passage to a higher form of life. The visionary and the suicide bomber come to see the demands of the body as things to be shunned opposed or ignored. To the demands of satisfaction, they counter with privation, the body demands food and the mystic replies by fasting, the body asks for gratification and the mystic gives mortification. Saint Simon lived for years on top of a scaffold accumulating vermin in his tattered robes; St Macarius lived his life wrapped in heavy chains to counter his own body's cravings for pleasure. All this stems from the belief that God cannot be known but only experienced once the distractions of the body are annihilated. So starts the systematic process that the Zen masters called "ceasing of desires", that Father Jean-Joseph Surin equated with a "Holy indifference". Appetites, desires, intellectual curiosity, all are to be deleted to make room. The body is the enemy.