The « dé-nouage » that I describe on this page started in September 2013 when I painted the blue key on the wall of monkeys. I realized later that it represented the inside of my mind. Then I reconsidered my dream from July, an excerpt of which I share below.
THE HOLE
The Dream of 22 July 2013
« I lose my white shoe while climbing an outdoor spiral staircase made of concrete.
On the 1st floor, there is a police station. The police officers kindly allow me to pick up my shoe.
I walk back down the stairs toward a large, star-shaped square where five streets of grey cobblestones meet.
Night is falling.
I see my mother running toward a street. She looks like a small black ball on the asphalt. She squats down.
I approach, and she smiles at me. Closer up, I still see her squatting in a puddle of water that has hollowed out a hole a few centimeters deep.
I jump into this hole, which instantly becomes 1.80 meters deep. The water comes up to my knees.
Mom takes a stone and holds it under my feet to help me get out.
Suddenly, 2 men, wearing overcoats like policemen or gangsters, stand above the hole.
One of the men holds a revolver to shoot me.
I wake up. »
That same day, I email my dream to my mother and ask her who these two men could possibly be?
She replies that she has no idea and tells me not to worry, that no one wants to kill me
A few days later, I decide that these 2 men are the 2 simpletons I had painted 15 years earlier in the shape of a monolith.
13 October 2013
After several attempts at this pair of thugs, I decide to draw them inside an ellipse, then to reduce them, transforming them in this way into a thought, a dream, something virtual.
Then, I decide to make them step out of the painting.
20 October 2013
In the end, I haven’t done anything with the two ruffians yet; I am still thinking.
For the bodies of the mother and the daughter, I choose yellow ochre, burnt sienna, white, and cobalt blue.
21 October 2013
I decide to erase them from the painting and remake them on another support, very heavily framed.
To do this, I draw a second, larger couple on my whiteboard, and I use the same tracing paper as for the first small couple.
22 October 2013
On the tracing paper, I am drawn to the fact that the pockets overlap. And I wonder: « what is inside these pockets? »
The answer will become obvious to me a week later.
23 October 2013
For the pair of miscreants, I reuse the colors from « Les Simplets » of 1998: black and white on a black and red background.
25 October 2013
I make this sketch: « Le coup du couteau sur le cou »…
...and the hand holding the knife reminds me of a hand with a knife that I had painted in 2012, modestly borrowed from Caravaggio’s representation of Abraham in « The Sacrifice of Isaac. »
I had already evoked a knife on a neck in a photomontage in 2001, 
which I transform to the point of making the blade disappear on the neck, which has turned blue like fear.
At the time, I wasn’t aware of the connection between this photomontage and the assault described in this essay, nor, for that matter, in my 2003 series of « tamed spikes » made of metal.
And I think of the knife between the two eyes in the 1998 series « Les règles de l’art ».
(In French, the same word, ‘règles’, is used for both ‘rules’ and ‘periods’)
In this series, I note the relationship between the knife and periods (les règles).
And I see a similarity between the sculpture « Les règles » and the sculpture « Wounded Niobid » used for the aforementioned red and black painting.
I had chosen this image because it evoked betrayal to me. Now, it also evokes the loss of children.
Thanks to a remark made by a visitor during an opening in ’98: « this looks more like a hemorrhage than periods, » I remembered that my mother had told me about her numerous self-induced abortions with knitting needles, and the hemorrhages that followed. She told me that these foeticidal manipulations had weakened her and caused her to lose, through a miscarriage, a pair of twins she wanted to keep. I was born from the next egg, which would have been discarded if those twins had lived.
I told this story in 2008 in « The Eggs »: a pair of twins left inside the egg on the right, and on the left, the 3 placentas—the twins plus the woman on the beach, my birth, I imagine.
MY MOTHER IN MY HEAD
Today, my mother tells me that these abortions continued after my birth and assures me that I could not have witnessed them, but that I might have been deeply affected by the massive amount of blood she lost every month (abusing aspirin for her migraines), because disposable sanitary pads did not exist back then and I watched the washing of the red-soaked cloths.
I used to have very severe menstrual pain, cysts on and in my ovaries, and lost very little blood, starting very late, at age 15. I have no memory of the first day of my period, but I remember that in high school, when I had my period, I would sit at the back of the classroom because I smelled or thought I smelled bad. A smell of a corpse. Fortunately, it only lasted a day or two.
The act of painting « My Mother in My Head » did not stop my menstrual pain; it was having a child that stopped it.
This story of flowing blood already appears in one of my very first paintings (undated, perhaps 1977 or ’80), transformed in 2003 into a light fixture aptly named by a friend: « 15 minutes before menopause. »
This late adaptation confirms the connection between the knife and periods.
26 October 2013
Returning to the matter at hand, I am restoring « Homo neanderthalensis (les simplets) » I redo the sand coating on the hemisphere representing me in this circumstance, and by mistake, I tear off a small polystyrene ball from the black rectangle representing Charlie at Saint-Raphaël in 1973. Damn! I try to glue it back on, but I use a glue that dissolves polystyrene. Double damn! I hesitate to tear off the second small ball!
I have a good photo of the version with the balls, so I allow myself to cut this ball off. I don’t know what to do with it. I leave it on the kitchen table; I will forget about it and Aeolus will do the rest.
Between this abstract version and the previous sketch « SONID », the black penis has disappeared and the white one has significantly decreased.
29 October 2013
27 November 2013
In 1978, pregnant by a lovely dark-haired Swedish man, I decided to have an abortion. The law authorizing it in France was recent (’75) and I have a very peaceful memory of that moment; the entire medical staff was joyful. Later on, I had a child that I truly wanted. I hope this law will never be questioned.
As for the rape, I have no memory of suffering physically, but I was terribly afraid.
My daughter in my head…one week before her birth.
Many thanks to Virginie and Julien for their valuable help with the translation.