Master digital artist Ray Caesar‘s solo exhibition, ‘The Trouble With Angels’ opens in Rome on the 14th of February at 7:00 pm for the public reception at the Dorthy Circus Gallery, with Ray in attendance! This will be followed on February 15 by a museum show at the Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, Turin.
The work from Ray’s exhibition is featured in the soon to be released March issue of beautiful.bizarre magazine, so we have kindly been given a sneak peek at the pieces he will be showing in Italy next week. Below we share some of these with you.
Ray also provided commentary on most pieces, giving us a deeply personal look into the artist and his work.
Images curtsey of Gallery House.
A Beautiful Thought
Both good and bad thoughts seem to pervade one’s mind and compete for residence in our soul and spirit. Provide the light and other good conditions for growth, and the seeds of gentleness and kindness of one’s thoughts will grow with harmony and calm. What we put into our mind is essentially what we will get out of it.
The Forgotten
A memory can live all alone and with passage of time, it can be forgotten… but “it” still exists, even though it is no longer acknowledged. Our ability to forget might be a survival skill where we live with the illusion that something did not happen….but there is always that place where the forgotten memories live. They exist as if written in stone, even if we choose to not remember. On occasion, I tread in this strange land of memory and surprise myself with what I have left behind. A certain smell, a sight of a grin with decaying teeth, or a note played on a piano can suddenly find that place in each of us, like a key unlocking an ancient door. I am not surprised at the unpleasant things I have left there but I am perplexed as to all the good things that were left along with the bad. Perhaps I hid them there for safekeeping.
Palpitation
A shock of the heart, the skip of a beat, and the sudden realization of our mortality. It’s something that I know well enough. Like the tick tocking of a clock that suddenly stops and then starts again when a stranger happens to ask for the time. Life is made of such moments…one minute here and the next minute…gone.
Aria
Sometimes all you need is the air that you breath. The small thin atmosphere of our little planet nurses the essential elements that sustains us in this tiny world that we inhabit. So much life and growth spring forth from something so fragile and delicate, that this film of nitrogen, oxygen and argon is possibly the most valuable substance there is. It seems strange to me that something we can barely see and can hardly touch is so vital for us, and without it, all is death and dust.
The Day After Yesterday
The past is fixed in stone and the future is as yet unwritten… it often seems we live in the moment without realising it. The passage of time recedes like a journey from a home we only half remember. If our life was like a string in the infinity of time, perhaps each moment is relived over and over, and this life is just like a broken record replaying itself over eternity and that string exists in present time and always will be. Perhaps time is not so linear as we think and each moment is experienced in a fragmented way without the tidy progression of one day after the next that we think we experience. All I know is today, and with that, I try to have acceptance of the past and hope for the future.
Winter
Fallen
Desire
Wanting a thing and having a thing are quite a different realm. The sensual pleasure of wanting something is like bare skin to the touch of that desire, and it can be powerful, intoxicating and all consuming. No matter how much we accumulate, it seems we still must have more. If less is more, just think how much more “More” would be. I would not give up my Desire for anything …not even possessing the thing I ultimately desire. In this way I live with less, for I will never trade my desire for that which it can buy.
The Collector
The desire to have an elusive thing and to capture the essence of its freedom is to destroy the very thing you desire. Thought, memory and emotion can be those kinds of elusive treasures that can be as fragile as a bird. A great deal of my work is about hunters and prey, and trying to capture a lost innocence that is at best an effort in futility…but I never give up this hunt, simply because I cannot… as it seems it is in my nature.
We Three Kings
Mother and Child
Venus nursing Eros on the milk of human kindness and love….which had the effect of making him a holy little terror with wings and a very dangerous bow and arrow that could take an eye out….but then Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind and heart. So much of my work stems from the 17 years I spent working at Toronto’s Hospital For Sick Children and in some ways the image of Mother and Child was seen everywhere in that massive hospital. In each room you passed, be it a waiting room, sitting room or the cafeteria, there was a mother holding her child in such a way as if she didn’t know how much longer the child would be in her embrace. You would have had to be blind to not see the love, care, hope and fear in her eyes. I suspect this image has been burned in my own mind for many years and making art has always been a way of giving birth to the powerful feeling and emotion of memory….and from such a birth is love born anew.
L’Etudiant
I have resigned myself to the fact that I will always be a student. It seems I am forever listening to voices in my mind that provide explanations of not how things are, but how they could be and should be. There exists in each and every one of us, an alternate reality and a forgotten land of the subconscious which is equally important as the land we think we live in. The truth is that our conscious awareness originates from within, and the perceptions of sight, sound and touch are merely creations of senses we have learned to trust as true. We each live in a subconscious state, and I have this suspicion that deep in this mysterious inner world are doors and windows into something that can only be called the “Superconscious”.
Tea With Me And He
A Private Affair
