| Ray Caesar. “Self Examination” |
Interview with Ray Caesar
A digital and visionary poet
Those who like to explore enchanted places or travel through the sovereign kingdoms of fantasy, cannot be lacking to visit the Dorothy Circus Gallery, a delicious space in Rome, like a Wonderland dedicated to the new trends in contemporary figurative art. The Gallery will open its program for 2014 with the personal by Ray Caesar, a visionary artist, well-known all over the world, and unquestioned leader of the Digital Art.
Caesar is considered one of the most important representatives of Pop Surrealism, a movement born in the Los Angeles area at the end of 70ties, in the environment of underground pop art, graffiti, pop music, comics and cartoons. The artist gives a personal interpretation of this graphic universe, setting it in a Victorian and rococo style atmosphere, and revisiting it in fairy-like clue. In his fairy tales Caesar always introduces an estranged element, with a touch of erotic and macabre environment, just to bewilder the delicate elegance of his heartless nymphs. Together with new works of art in 20 copies, just created for the gallery which has the exclusive agency in Italy, five new works in one copy, the famous single varnished collected by Madonna and by other artist belonging to the show business, will be exhibited. Ray Caesar, although he has already exhibited his works of art in Italy, will be present at the inauguration for the first time and will entertain with the press and the collectors for a reserved meeting.
| Ray Caesar “A Beautiful Thought” |
Ray Caesar is an original charismatic character, his thought is independent and genial, able to match the undoubted artistic skill, an extraordinary availability, a rare liberty of expression; furthermore he has the talent to reveal his inner world by intense and poetic words, able to involve the audience like his imagines. Instead of making a list of his successes, we are trying to let his works of art speak; meanwhile, we are giving him voice by this interview, which he has answered to, with much irony and avoiding any kind of auto censorship.
When did you perceive presences and heard voices for the first time? Did this occur during your childhood?
I remember being about 5 or 6 years old and seeing a woman sit by my bed. She spoke kind and gentle words which was a very unusual thing for me at that time of life. No one else mentioned her or remembered her or spoke of her. I still hear her to this day and I just simply accept her on her own terms. I call her Hope.
| Ray Caesar “L´Etudiant” |
How did you transform fear and anguish during your youth? And how does this happen nowadays?
I did it by hiding that fragile and gentle part of myself into a window I made in my own mind. I placed all my fears into a beautiful inner world and today all I am doing is making that window available through making pictures of it in this world.
Why do your sweetest porcelain dolls cut the wedding cake with a sinister butcher-like knife? What idea of marriage do the wedding dress and the knife suggest?
The wedding is the marriage of the disparate parts of ourselves... the parts we know and the parts we don't. The mysteries of all the lives that live inside this one entity called “self”. The cake is the celebration and the sacrifice of innocence and the sweetness of life. The knife and the cutting are the sacrificial hunt for the things we desire and share... the basic instinct to survive is to consume life and fight for the right to live as there is a brutal side to us as a species and as individuals. Some place in all this madness is kindness and beauty and love and perhaps most of all… Hope.
What has changed, in your artistic life, the relationship with your wife? In what way has the Japanese culture influenced you? And the Samurai sword?
I met my wife when I was 15 and her Japanese culture affected me a great deal. Her father had survives a Russian prison camp after WWII and he was a very quiet man that understood I had difficulty from my own childhood life. He very quietly taught me the ways of Bushido... to balance violence and anger with gentleness and patience. That something worth doing is worth doing well.
| Ray Caesar “Mother and Child” |
You said that you were dog born. How do you feel in a dog skin? What relationship exists between the dog who is inside you and the one living with you and your wife?
I was born in 1958, the year of the dog. I lived as a dog born into a family of wolves and I accept life on these terms just as a dog does. What I love about dogs are that they are kind and gentle and willing to make a fool of themselves but when it comes down to it they are willing to lay their life to defend you without a second thought. They balance violence and gentleness better than any creature on Earth and I feel we have a lot to learn from them.
What spiritual legacy have your mother and sister left you after their death? Does it happen to you to “meet” them when you “frequent” the fantastic world where you are creating your angels?
I have a condition called Sleep Paralysis and when I wake at night I find it hard to move and for some reason I see visions. My mother occasionally appears at this time... often as a child. When I see her in my dreams it becomes a catalyst for lucid dreaming and the awareness that I am in a dream. Its quite often that I bring back images from these dreams and more often feelings and emotions that are hard to put into words so I make images of them.
You have worked for 17 years, as a photographer, in a pediatric hospital. There, you saw human beings that were welcome and suffered for any kind of diseases, physical malformations, or even in agony. How and how much has such an experience influenced your way of representing a child, an object or a scenario?
I create a little world for them in my work. A small heaven that a disquiet spirit can embody. I make a world where man and nature can never hurt them again and in this little world they are in power and can hunt back all the things taken from them... they can hunt back their innocence.
| Ray Caesar “Tea with me and he” |
Did you ever occur to be visited in your fantastic world, by some of the children who died in the hospital, and to reveal you a secret, or teach something? Can you tell us some episodes?
Memory is a strange thing and it is tied to our subconscious in such a way that evokes meaning in our dreams and thoughts. My work is tied to the experience of that hospital as it is to my childhood and present. I do often dream of that vast hospital and in my dreams it is huge with many hidden corridors and vast meeting areas. Some dreams are pleasant and others are not but they all feel like a part of me in some very deep way. I do very vividly remember a little boy called Stephen who was tiny and lived in the hospital all his short life. He was born with only half a heart. I remember when my niece had heart surgery herself I entered her room while she was still recovering... I remember that little boy sitting in her room watching over her. He smiled and told me his name... I do not know if it was reality or a vision. All I know is that my niece remembers him sitting there too.
Why do the limbs of your figures transform themselves into spider or bat legs, or fish tentacles? Is there a connection with the sensuality and eroticism expressed by your nymph? Why do the metamorphoses start just from the limbs?
My father had a severe form of childhood arthritis and his feet were very deformed. His toes were twisted and malformed as were parts of his feet and lower legs. I remember them almost like hoven feet. I remember very carefully taking off his shoes as my father sat in pain after coming home from work and placing his feet in a bowl of water. I remember thinking that we are not always what we seem under our clothing and that has always been a metaphor for not always being what we think we are under our skin.
What message do you intend to communicate by the contrast between the deadly white face and the red lips of you angels?
As a child I used to dress up in my mother and sisters clothing and I would put on eyemakup and red lips... I looked much older and it was an attempt to escape my life and live another and never be found. I remeber looking at my deathly white face with deep red lips in the mirror and thinking one day I will make a picture of that. I think we are all dancing between life and death and that death may not be what we think it is.
| Ray Caesar. “We three kings” |
When do you depict scenarios taken from your previous life, are you aware of the age you are living at that moment?
I mix it all up... the past the present and the future and the world of my subconscious which seems timeless. Having dissociative identity disorder it is like living with distorted time. I can be lost in the past or even another life while just walking down the street and hours can pass before something knocks me out of a very deep daydream.