Leonora Carrington settled in Mexico City in 1942, on Chihuahua Street, in a house with no façade, just a window at the top and a narrow door on the side, revealing nothing of the cold exterior. Entering the house was the first step, the first bridge into a world where the furniture, objects and plants were extensions of her mind and soul. She was not a painter, sculptor or poet; she was much more than that. She was a creative soul, navigating between several worlds, thus achieving Unity of Thought. Updating the unconscious, making it coexist fully with consciousness in order to achieve the revealed state. The sculpture of the cat woman dated 5 March 1951 reveals this essential symbolism, thus opening the sea in two, unveiling the secrets of being.
She produced very few sculptures during this period. This one uses the wooden neck of a musical instrument, topped with a carved and painted cat's head. The body is covered with numerous painted symbols, and the throat is pierced by a wooden stick from which two musical strings attached to keys at the base of the neck descend laterally. The breasts are perfectly centred and aligned, with a triangle drawn between them. Below, a painted moon from which sacred figures and animals ascend and descend, evoking Jacob's ladder. At the bottom, a fish swims in the waters of the belly, where two sculpted hands are delicately superimposed. The sex is open, the interior is painted red, two hands are open on either side of the opening, and below, a red circle radiates in a hollow. Finally, two human-like silhouettes lie in opposite directions, each topped by a crescent moon.
This sculpture encapsulates the essence of the artist's thinking and possesses all the sefirotic dimensions of the world. The cat refers to the nine lives associated with the nine gates she regularly mentions in her writings. The tree of sefirots, of the 10 worlds, from the highest, the crown, to the lowest, the kingdom, reveals the divine flow that gradually travels from top to bottom and bottom to top.
The body, mirror of the world, is composed of its different facets, these nine degrees. Nine, like a renewal, a birth, like the physical openings between the inner and outer worlds. The ninth sphere, or sphere of foundation, connects the upper and lower worlds. At the level of the head, a star shines above the bridge of the nose, a bird descends on the right side of the forehead, and a figure rises on the left side. The forehead is also open, separating the right hemisphere from the left hemisphere, where hybrid figures are engraved and painted. Absolutely nothing is left to chance or, to quote Einstein's famous phrase, ‘chance is God walking incognito’.
The openwork and painted form at the level of the genitals has nothing sexual about it; it is the matrix that we could call the Origin of the World, the primary vitality, fulfilled, liberated.
From the musicality of the soul to the depths of being, this work, or rather this masterpiece, offers our eyes and ears ontological knowledge of the origin.
"I am nine doors.
I will open the one you knock on."
With this sculpture, one does not acquire an image or an object, or a play on words. By owning this work, one agrees to penetrate the secrets of the world, to no longer think of the world as an object and oneself as a subject, but to bring them together in a perpetual alliance.
Fabien Béjean-Leibenson
