Painting

The starting point for the series was the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas who wrote in On Escape (1935) that “Shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget (faire oublier) our basic nudity. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up.” Shame confronts us with something about us which we don’t understand, and it’s what Jacques Derrida described in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), where he wrote about “the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal”. When confronting an animal in its natural state whilst being naked oneself, Derrida observes a curious occurrence taking place: there is shame, but also the feeling of being ashamed for being ashamed. The question Derrida is asking -- “And why this shame that blushes for being ashamed?” -- became the title for my series, as I am too investigating the complex feelings and inner dilemmas associated with shame and the “nakedness of being”. What particularly interests me in the context of shame is the relationship with ourselves. According to Levinas, nakedness is shameful not only because we are exposed to the gaze of others, but also to that of ourselves. It is what Michael Foucault wrote about in Confessions of the Flesh (published in 2018) when discussing the philosophical writings of Clement of Alexandria: the problem of the sin without any witness other than the conscience means that the act of concealing a sin doesn’t diminish it. “Secrecy reveals the shame, which constitutes a judgement that conscience itself renders,” wrote Foucault and this particular relationship of the conscious judging mind and the naked body is at the heart of my artistic exploration.