‘There should be a core of something, something with a heart. Myself is too small, just a start.’
Everything on this site, whether its design, writing, cartoons or comics, is an extension of my mind, my body, my feelings: me, Marcel Ozymantra. This art is an expression of the feelings and ideas that shape me as a person. Art is what happens when thoughts and feelings leave an aesthetic impression on the material reality outside of your own body.
That doesn’t mean you will be able to read these works as a guide to my personality. They’re not an instruction video. Art is what happens when my mind meets the rough surface of reality. What occurs in my mind might be fluid and perfect, but the media to express it with are limited by their material characteristics. The material world imposes on us its own limitations. Softening up that materialness does show a certain amount of craftsmanship, but it also dilutes the personality of both the artist and the art.
Not only isn’t this art meant as an instruction to Ozymantra, in most cases it’s and invitation to the audience to participate by making your own interpretations. Though originating from my conscious/subconscious the art becomes a complete thing only in the eye of the beholder. It’s when others attach their stories, feelings and ideas that an artwork grows and assumes a new identity. As I once wrote in Dutch: ‘Er moet een kern zijn van iets, iets met een hart. Mijzelf is te klein, alleen een start.’ Which roughly translates to: ‘There should be a core of something, something with a heart. Myself is too small, just a start.’
Browsing the site you will notice it veers off in many different directions. Some of it is clearly commercial and was even partly made with a computer. Other things hardly translate to the digital, like paintings with their many layered colors and stumps that stick out of the canvas.
It’s a world of ever evolving and ever expanding growth. I go back to old images and motives, sometimes done in a totally different medium, to delve into the subject once again, exploring the new possibilities of the more mature artist. Insights from the past find their way in the future. Now and then I’m trying out new things, finding a newer way to express new thoughts.
The entirety of a person is too complex to catch in just one artwork, or in one way of working at art. A human personality is infinitely complex and deep, marrying fetal infancy to your current maturity in one body. Considering that, there will never be an end to the need to express and solidify Ozymantra in the material world.
But this applies to all and everyone. The celebration of one person in its diversity is a celebration of the diversity of every human ever lived. We are all made of stars, but so much more complex, of so much more interest, because we can know ourselves, we can show ourselves and we can love the other as themselves.
Marcel Ozymantra
Only regret I have in the case of the site is that it hardly touches on my poetry, prose and essays. Most of that hasn’t been translated in English yet. Maybe I’ll find another way to share that with you.
Foto Giovanna van Vugt
