Pierrot 3.0: Renunciating Stereotypes to Drive Social Change

This series of portraits (2021-2023) depicts the artist's muse Joy, as a cross-cultural Pierrot. This stock character of French pantomime and the Italian commedia dell'arte, the sad clown Little Peter, is transposed here to an Asian setting as he mocks the boundaries and shibboleths of beauty, gender, sexuality and race. While in the European context he is most commonly known as the third wheel in the relationship between Columbine and Harlequin, the staid older lover who loses out eventually to the flashier and younger suitor, in the Asian contest he becomes a renouncer, a 'sadhaka' for whom loss is the path to heaven. For in the Asian context, renunciation is not passive, and 'sadhana' comes from a root that means 'to work, to accomplish something'. The 'sadhaka' believes all stereotypes are an illusion, a hindrance in the path of the expansion of the human consciousness. By abandoning these notions, Pierrot is able to look deeper through the cracks within the human condition. He channelizes his focus towards social activism thereby driving positive change. Here Pierrot is the maker, the self-fashioner who takes the trash and tawdry clutter of his world and builds portals to new realms with it. In these realms, he is a prince both regnant and ragged, majestic and melancholic. He rules with the turbulence of Mother Kali herself. Taken out of the tension of the love triangle, he becomes a lover and spurner of himself, playing every role like a child trying on faces. He is a prince, a revolutionary, a Talib, a snake charmer, a pieta, a patient in a torture ward, a transgender, a victim of climate change. His audience is entirely flat, grinning at him from the wall, a one-dimensional cheer squad. They don't get it, but they laugh anyway. In the process, he underlines the absurdity of Big Men, the fragility of their claims to dominance, for if one takes away their pomp and circumstance, they become little more than spoilt brats or scared orphans. If Columbine is the 'satvik' figure in the triangle and Harlequin the 'rajasik', then Pierrot represents 'tamas', the Saturnine aspect of human consciousness, tied to contemplation, insight, introspection and melancholia. In most Asian philosophies, these are positive forces, the necessary counterweights to passion, desire, acquisitiveness and materialism.