Mesmerizing

What does it make it? Mesmerizing, as soon as there is some light integrating the realm of fantasy, imagination, even of god, with the realm of touching, grounding, earthing, the material that leads us to take action to decide. At times, the decisions can be very blurry, or they cannot be absolutely defined.

Since I was little, I was always wanting to stay in this liminal place where I could still be dreaming awake. I would see colors, listen to sounds, and be mesmerized by the stimuli that my senses were perceiving, but was that real, or was that something I was making up? Fast forward many, many years, now I feel that this is how inspiration lands: it lands because I hear something, I see something, I am stimulated by my senses, or even better, by my emotional body. The senses are trying to translate into a form, to a shape, to a sentence, to an idea, into something that must make sense.

I like this liminal space that we are in right now in the collective, where most of the things that are revealed are possibly waking more people up. The conspiracy theorist already knew this because we were able to sense these anomalies. We were able to trust our bodies with the knowledge of what really was going to hurt us or not.

As an artist, I work not with less is more, but I start with more is more. The more, the merrier. I get stimulated by music or landscape or even just words and ideas, and then I go through a whole journey of accumulation of these, gathering them either printed on the wall or in places that I can have a distance and observe them. This practice is super important, not only in art but in life. The accumulation of stimuli can sometimes distort what we see, our perception. If our perception is distorted, then the narratives we create can have severe consequences.

What happens when I can no longer create that distance?

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

These times and in the next 18 months, we have the possibility to really grasp beyond this timeline that you perceive as reality. Like Ulysses in The Odyssey, who gets lured by the sirens, it is not his sexual appetite that moves him, but the appetite for knowledge, for knowing what is real in that moment. We all get lured by fantastic shapes, by possibilities of self-glory, by being loved by someone or a whole group of people. In reality, can we really see ourselves? How is our reality mesmerized or not?

Odysseus gives me another question: can I listen to the song without surrendering the direction of the vessel? was the danger the song itself? if not, the danger appears when the lure smashes the direction with a false sense of authority.

Let us explore the word “mesmerizing.” Etymologically, mesmerism takes its name from Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that an invisible, universal force could operate through and between bodies, something he called animal magnetism. What passes between a body and an image, between one person and another, between memory and perception, that gives something enough force to enthrall us?

I love this word because, throughout my artwork, I have been told many times by my commissioners, clients, and the public that my work has this capacity to mesmerize, to hypnotize, leading directly to Hypnos, sleep. I keep returning to this language throughout this inquiry: dreaming awake, waking up, illusion, delusion, awakening from a dream. Perhaps mesmerization exists somewhere along that threshold, where I am awake enough to perceive and still capable of dreaming what I perceive into another form.