Homer
Ian Charles Lepine seeks to present beings trapped in a crossroads of contradiction: his interest is to display creatures whose very existence negates their very existence. These are beings at war with themselves, a war where all victories cannot but prove pyrrhic.
His sculptures are frequently complemented by a poem in either English, French, or Italian, that seeks to give a voice to its inert matter.
Author: Ian Charles Lepine
Year: 2022
Title: Homer
Technique: Ceramic clay sculpture, painted with oxides and enamel.
Homer is perhaps the greatest contribution to mythology ever created by the Greeks. In Antiquity his provenance was fought over by the most prominent of Greek cities as a cause of honour. Nothing is known of the man, but tradition has concocted a personality.
We don't know if Homer was real, but we know he was blind. How could he not be to have such in-sight into the human soul? In the land of the Phaeacians, Odysseus narrates the Odyssey: telling tales, retelling them is reliving them; language is action, literature, life.
This piece plays with Homer's blindness, but also his identification with Odysseus. Out of his in-sight comes the scene with the cyclops, but whether it is a vision, an inspiration, a memory, or a present event is impossible to tell.
Homer
Into your blindness pours a golden vision
That shall the course of art forever change.
But this you cannot see, alas, how strange!
That fate will blind us all with indecision,
As we can’t see the future in the now.
But though we are right now the present’s host
The past for us alike is just a ghost.
How can it be, oh, tell me, that you know
The only way to live is in a tale?
For nothing happens here until it’s told.
Odysseus weeps, long after pains enfold,
Once language lifts the blind and tragic veil.
A thousand voices sung upon your harp;
A thousand broken hearts with pains too sharp.
–15 August MMXXII