Cathexes
A cathexis is an investment of energy into a person, object or idea; our ability to relate to the world around us as humans is structured by how we cathect to, attend to, and intend towards things, seemingly external to us.
According to Freud, the human’s ego is a sort of build-up of past cathexes: when the cathected object goes away, the structure of behavior that the human held towards that object remains. Over time, many attachments and detachments form a sort of complex of behavior, where new objects are approached with the contexts of the old.
Surrealist practice, specifically psychic automatism, or the artistic equivalent of free association, is one that intends to shed light on these unconscious patterns through artistic creation. It attempts to express the inexpressible parts of our psyches that remain forever distant from reason or logic.
In my own usage of this practice, over the past few months especially, I have attempted to utilize abstraction as a tool for discovering how my own ego approaches the compositional structure of a blank sheet of paper, and what sorts of patterns naturally arise through my interaction with it. These patterns, in my opinion, operate as the imprints of a visual sort of cathexis and dictate how my eye and hand moves across the page unconsciously.
My goal with these pieces was not only to attempt to express these unconscious patterns, but to disrupt them and see if I could generate new ways of seeing the page, and thus generate new ways of being myself.
Beyond my own personal explorations, I hope that these compositions and sculptures allow for the viewer to find that their perception might be structured by something deeper, or maybe less conscious, than they had previously believed.
