Sharon Stone, La vie des animaux - vol.1 by Vincent Delbrouck
The new year was an ideal time to externalize all the trauma of Christmas. I met up with old friends and we ventured downtown, surrounded by crowds of imbeciles. A few bars later, I was drunk, in a mist, dancing, an imbecile myself, yelling, bouncing, sweaty and beautiful. I headed for the toilet for a break.
A messy collage of female and bird imagery, dirty mixed-media, hand-drawn notes and color spills are however neatly collaged on the clean white pages of Sharon Stone. A parrot, a butt, a turtle, Jesus, a couple kissing, a lot of breasts, a teenager, a cactus, a church, and a myriad of beautiful women all share a space.
I am sitting on the bathroom seat in a moment of awe, of slow-motion fascination. On the walls of the bathroom are thousands of these clippings. Have I been with all these women? Are these all clichés from my drunken life, an epic inebriated journey, smeared with lipstick, bodily fluids, perfumes of booze and roses. No, these belong to all those that occupied the bathroom. Instances from the amorous lives of all. Icons, personal photographs, porn, magazine trimmings… fictions and reality completely blurred by the liquor.
Sharon Stone has a clean and yet somewhat provocative, or spontaneous assemblage, a collage that is both flat on the paper and thick, textured, vibrant as a concord. This abrupt negation adds to the naive aspect of the edition. As if it were one’s personal collection, or perhaps an amalgam of everyone’s collective unconsciousness. All of us sharing this euphoria, in this utopia.
The stall, or the book, is enriched by passages, by obsessions, by graffiti. My world is all of a sudden so colorful. So sensual.
There's something cinematographic to the successive pages of the book, like shots and sounds and characters parading. Something voyeuristic. Like a journal of women, absorbed in soft eroticism, for me. I’m submerged, but when looking at details and moments, the book is all but over-saturated. Even its bright colors are actually sophisticated.
As I attempt to sober out, to clear my thoughts, to comprehend, or simply to process where I am, amongst the burlesque, the drama, the caricature, the sex, the beauty, I feel elated, ecstatic. Seconds later, I am overwhelmingly sad. Alien from these feminine figures. I am no longer inspired or seduced. The women on the Sharon Stone’s pages are foreign to me.