On making, excess, beauty and the openness of meaning

Excess, as the inversion of my inner tranquillity, is the ultimate expression of the realisation that everything is equal. The sky, the water and the wind, are the same… My inner tranquillity translates into excess and exuberance in my work. Perhaps this is the logical consequence of my working method, in which I set aside my self-awareness and open myself to the cosmic vibrations that can flow freely through me, without the limitations of ego or self-censorship. Cosmic vibrations filtered through the grotesque. Within me, my fondness for the strange and the grotesque merges with my inner enlightenment, leading to this inversion. What appears contradictory becomes logical. Images are not conceived or designed beforehand, at least not by me, but perhaps by a divine hand. They emerge in the course of the work. Within this grotesque inversion, what is ugly becomes beautiful, what is violent becomes sweet. The perverse and the obscene are no longer perverse and obscene; they manifest themselves as hellish mutated fruit with arms and legs, blowing a trumpet with their anus, as a diabolical inversion of angels playing trumpets.

The excessive, the incongruous, the extravagant and the strange are not ends in themselves, but offer possibilities that scarcely exist within a more familiar visual language. This constellation creates a new reality that gives rise to new meanings. Meanings unknown even to me, for I am merely a spectator to the emergence of my own work. When you consciously open yourself to the cosmos, you should not pretend that the resulting work is yours. It comes into being in a divine universe, in which your hand may indeed become an extension of it, transforming into the hand of God, while you remain a spectator on the sidelines of this creative process.

I am like the jester in the margins of my own work. Like the jester in the marginalia of the main text, written outside myself. I move through that world and comment on it in the form of small drolleries in the margins. I leave it undecided what constitutes the main text and what constitutes the margin. If you look carefully, you will see me standing there, looking at you from within my work.

Nevertheless, I do have opinions about the inversion of aesthetic, physical and moral boundaries in some of my works. But is it up to me to take a position on this or to assign meaning? Meaning arises outside of me, and therefore it is not my place to interpret it. There is meaning. In some cases, there is even personal meaning for me. But meaning is fluid and changes according to the viewer and over time. Some violent images, such as those of self-mutilating Blemmyae, can of course be seen as a grotesque inversion of my own self-love. Or is it simply self-mutilation? When one of them cuts off his own genitals and offers them as a gift to someone who already has too much, while his severed hand lying on the ground makes the universal mano fica gesture, or when he laughingly tears open his own abdomen. There is meaning. It is up to you, the viewer, to interpret it. Not me, the jester in the margins.

The sweet, colourful and decorative forms of Rococo combine beautifully with the violent, obscene and disturbing scenes that unfold before my eyes.

I like to see my artworks of food that mutate on your table while your own food mutates. However unappetising it may be, something of that saccharine sweetness stimulates your digestion, encourages you to eat more and makes you reflect on the transformation taking place within yourself.

The subject matter is dark, but its appearance is sweet.

Excessive, organically twisting ornamentation and the visual abundance of a wide range of unappetising elements overwhelm the work and displace the much-desired balanced, controlled composition. Excess as the unwelcome intruder that displaces aesthetics and good compositional taste.

Certain historical associations come to mind: Rococo fantasies and fifteenth-century grotesques, combined into a style that could have existed, but which, through the cowardly restraint of art history, never did.

They are Rayastre’s artistic preferences, spontaneously merging in a stream of unconsciousness, while carrying along other associations, such as Mannerism and Surrealism. The work has something naïve, indeterminate and unformed about it.

As though details are engaged in a process of transformation, caught, as it were, in the act. Embryonic forms acquiring hands and legs. I find these embryonic forms more beautiful than fully developed forms, however desirable those may be. Just as a ruin is more beautiful than the ultimate architectural form. It promises a new form. It is on its way. It is transforming into something else. The embryo is thus full of promise, whereas the adult human being can only disappoint. Until that human being, too, decays and changes into a more interesting state of decomposition. Or explodes into cosmic light and merges into the ecstatic All for that matter. Whatever you prefer.

The material outcome is a dreamlike world full of mystery, in which forms transform and become frozen in our reality in their temporary state.

How different, and how much duller, it would be if these forms were perfectly executed. Associative freedom and a multi-interpretable, layered reality without unequivocal meaning. Recognisability and the strange intermingle in an unfinished cosmic form.

I have an undeniable fascination with the wondrous, the rare and the exceptional. My work often takes the form of Wunderkammer-like objects, not through conscious choice, but as a consequence of the working method described above. There is a certain relationship between collecting, arranging and creating a universe of one’s own. I enjoy wandering through flea markets in France and Belgium, where I find objects with a second, third or even countless subsequent lives. These objects, although dead, are alive. They bring a certain energy into my work. Transformative energies. The combination of natural, artificial, historical and fantastical elements brings an energy into the work that could never otherwise be achieved. The Wunderkammer thus becomes a starting point for a more personal and mysterious world of imagery.

The transparency in my work refers to the moment when I myself became transparent.

Decay in my work is connected to memory.

I never release a work before it is finished. This is rooted in the hermetic idea that food must be prepared in a sealed pot. If you lift the lid too soon, its essence evaporates and the rest becomes mixed with unwanted energies. So yes, I seal the pot. And inside that pot, essential energies mingle freely and without restriction, leading to the final work.

One day, I was on my way to a shamanic gathering. As I looked at the fuel gauge on my car’s dashboard, I saw the numbers change from 999.9 to 000.0 – a premonition of the great reset I was about to experience. I stepped out of my car and went to the ceremony. The group was small but dedicated. I inhaled the holy secretion deeply and slowly. Due to my large lung capacity I could inhale for a long time. I heard the shaman say ‘stop’ and I felt my body falling back and experienced the world disintegrating, like everything losing molecular integrity, each molecule separating from one another and vaporizing. The disintegration felt like fizzing air, reversed. At the final moment of this I was already gone, into abstraction, absorbed by the All. There no longer was a Self or I to perceive anything. My first realization of where I was came with the realization that I was coming from somewhere I had no memory of. Again, the fizzing air, but now cleansing me on every possible level. I was a molecule, moving in a cosmic stream of energy. I was the energy. Being a conscious part of the All is the most healing experience possible and although it happens in a timeless and formless eternity, in earthly time it only lasted 30 minutes. In and out through a portal. This changed my life, for eternity.”