Judit B.Bodo

Abditorium Journal

„However I was in the age of moulting. One cracks open its fray and dull, rotten and fibrous skin, hardened almost to a crustacean shell, and crawls out of himself. One thought it’s me. Turned out, it was a mask, like all other past ones. Now the fresh skin is sensitive / delicate again. (…) The soul is the child of a Ten-thousand-skins fire… Ten thousand skins shall peel off until it can finally reach itself.“ (Béla Hamvas - Fasting, retreat, silence)

The world as we call it, in reality is unbelievably narrow, because only parts and pieces that you can see of yourself, or that you can touch with your hands. How the pillars of our self-identification are in constant motion, the criteria cast into moments of time without authenticity. They do not give real support to the “I,” and therefore the “I” as an image does not stand the test of investigation. The series of works named "Abditorium Journal", was created in 2015 - 2018, during retreats on isolated homesteads  in Sicily and are pages from a very intimate diary, like documents of a particular, literal retreat era.
In a such a place, when nothing gave us a familiar view, self remained, is an internal motivation  arranging between accumulated “parts of ourselves” and after interpreting their pieces, is become possible to reassemble them.
In this analogy, the originally oil- and acrylic-based, relief-like, layer-rich self-portraits and old paintings are sliced, organised into a new compositional structure with collage techniques and finalised using a mix  with digital methods. It's an attempt to create by fragmentation and through the process of abstractization and reinterpretation, to take away the things that in lived patterns no longer work together, resulting in something completely new from the parts.  Lots of works, selfportraits where the mask symbol is a constant, silent witness to the demolition and to the process of birthing new forms  out of metamorphic structures. According to ancient knowledge the man is only a mask, an envelope. „Persona“ = mask. Marathon practice is self-observation, interfering with captured images, memories that maturing over the years, inner work, sourdough, which is dormant and then comes to life in contact. The elapsed time is clear, ripe, and the hand moves by itself, overwriting the old, re-threading, reinterpreting.