I wanted to make a sculpture close to death so I folded a piece of paper and on top of it I wrapped a larger piece of paper, I repeated that action until the little, layered paper ball was dense enough. And then I tossed it into a ceramic ashtray in the garden and set fire to it. I ended up liking the way the paper ball looked, sothered with variations of grey, brown and yellow tinted by the cigarette buds that were accompagnying it in the fire. It had similiarities in size and form as a burnt brusselsprout. When I sliced it in half it It was layered like an onion, but didnt have the same smell or slimyness, instead it was this hard little ball of cabbage which I’d dreaded eating as a child.

Leonardo Da Vinci made a technical drawing of half a man’s head, disclosing the layers between the brain and the flesh. Next to it, he drew an onion sliced in half as comparison to the halved head of a man. The frontal drawing of the halved onion presents it’s beautiful inside curvature of layers, Da Vinci saw that there existed no hierachy between either the center and periphery of an onion or the human head .

The philosophical, technical and artistic onion-head is an aspect of figurative drawing that I have difficulties grasping. I rarely draw and never technical enough for it to answer me questions about spatiality. To draw a human head it was required to understand the anatomy of an onion, the reasoning for the shape of the skull, the amount of inside that suffices the surface. The painted portrait is enigmatic because it seems uninformed about its inside. Georges Didi-Huberman writes that a human brain is unaware of the architecture it’s situated in, that we are incapable of imagining our true, inner spatiality which is the cradled ceiling of our skull. Even though there is a direct, physical contact between the brain and the inside of the face, it is unknown to us. The skull is a chalky shell, a frozen non-mimic. The tradition of animation is making something non-living appear as if it was alive. The fearful image of the skull as just a box where the enigmatic act of thinking and being happens seems to be punctured by fiction: in cinema and comics non-humans are animated to behave like us, dangly skeletons walk around like lewd perverts or drunks who’ve lost their brain and Donald Duck is a greedy man ready to step on whomever he can in his endeauvors for pleasure and power. Moralising is most efficient when it holds up a mirror. I’m also thinking of Isa Genzken’s black and white photograph series titled “X-Rays.” It’s motifs are x-rayed bodies, cropped from the upper-body up, all skully, drinking from wine-glasses. The photographs are personal and tragicomic, one would mostly come across an x-ray in the case of an injury. It’s striking how different Isa Genzken’s x-ray skull-photos are from Felix Nadar’s mid-19th century photographs from the catacombs in Paris and yet they still belong in the same history of imagemaking, a fascination of the skull as a photographic object. In 1862, the French photographer Felix Nadar invented the flash. With carbon-electrode batteries he generated enough electrical light to photograph the dark undergrounds of Paris. The serene, but terrifying images were of organized bones and skulls, all stacked and lined up against the walls of the narrow tunnels. When the photos were shown to the public they must have haunted the minds of the Parisian citizen, who became aware of the city’s underground architecture and its interior. The skull is the ultimate sculptural object as it is molded during birth, temporarely taking form of a cast of the narrow part of our mother’s pelvis. It is inside of us and when looking at it, it confronts us with its facelessness.