Gas masks
And
broken jaws
"Fool, fool
But also could I know that I am also horrible. After having been a man, having put all my strength into fully realizing what this word means and being just that, an object of terror for his own child, a daily burden for his wife, a disgrace for humanity .
Let me die»
Laze.
To live, to exist in the gaze of the other.
Build your individuality and build your humanity.
We exist in our morphology, we exist in our inner worlds. We are, and we are the reflection of the other. The broken faces, men deprived of their individuality, of the expression of their emotions, men who send back to us the image of the precariousness of our human condition.
Odysseus returning disfigured to Ithaca (transformed into an old man by Athena) is not recognized by anyone except his old nurse.
Borrowing from the past marked in their flesh.
The armistice did not sign the end of the war. In France, after years of war hidden in trenches, three million men returned disabled. Nearly 15% of injuries from 14-18 were in the face. Soldiers victim of a shell, a machine gun bullet, causing broken jaws, loss of skin, muscles, bones will become the "broken jaws". For these men with sometimes barely identifiable ravaged faces another fight began. After the horror of the trenches, they had to face the torture of disgrace. Disfigured, they are the image of the physical and psychological consequences of the Great War.
At the start of the Roaring Twenties, the broken faces become the reflection of what we want to forget. They constituted the emblem of the violence of war inflicted on the body affected in the most human of what embodies our humanity. The broken jaws are not only the stigmatized testimony in their flesh of the horrors of war. They are also carried the message of a reality and the testimony of the courage and the will for a possible reconstruction.
A reconstruction in their flesh and their spirit.
Masked to protect themselves then disfigured and mutilated, Greyg's approach here focuses on these men with reconstructed faces leaving one mask for another, from one deconstruction to the reconstruction of their humanity, men who carried the message of a reality and paved the way for awareness.
An approach that is from other angles finds an echo in our contemporary world.
