Poison or Juices

Paintings by Cameron Masters

A kernel is the inner, softer part of a seed. I suspect that buried inside the urge to travel, to experience the exotic, and to make art, is a kernel of alienation. Victor Segalen wrote over a century ago:

“Far from stifling it, the sensation of Exoticism enhances and enriches one’s personality. 

The exot, from the depths of his own clump of patriarchal soil, calls to, desires, sniffs out these beyonds. But in inhabiting them, in enclosing them, embracing them, savoring them, the Clump of earth, the Soil, suddenly and powerfully becomes Diverse. This double-edged balancing game results in an unflagging, inexhaustible diversity. (‘‘Advice to the Discerning Traveler’’). A wonderful example is that of Jules Boissière, a Provençal and a félibre, who wrote his most beautiful lines of verse in the Provençal tongue while in Hanoi. The dying Gauguin painted that pale pink, Brittany church tower in the snow. Boissière allowed that beautiful fruit of Provence to ripen in the tropics. Added riches, mixed together, yet well-ordered. The ridiculousness of individuals belonging exclusively to their native soil; —and of those who believe that nothing can be assimilated by us. Well, let us acknowledge the following: even if we did not find maternal nourishment elsewhere than in our native soil, would we not find poison or juices there? Is everything we drink or breathe in destined to turn into bone and muscle?” (1)

As an immigrant to Central America in my youth, I crossed paths with an odd assortment of naturalists, tax exiles, hippies, and other extremophiles. I assumed there may have been some exotic fantasies at their cores, some clearly and enthusiastically stated, others strategically withheld or unarticulated. Marx was desperate to cure our alienation from modern exploitation. But what of those, such as Segalen’s ‘exots,’ who cultivate their own alienation rather than seek to overcome it? 

(1) Excerpt from Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity

About the artist:

Cameron Masters (born USA, 1988, raised Costa Rica)

Masters' recent works grapple with the misalignments and fantasies of ‘expatriates,' global travelers, and other adrift explorers. Now nearly ubiquitous throughout the world's tropical regions and peripheries, these newcomers’ hopes, deficiencies, and impulses yield feverish scenes that Masters depicts using unprimed canvas and densely coated concrete reliefs.