• horsesvisions > paintings — Birdland > Genesis

"The son, the sign, the cross
Like the shape of a tortured woman, the true shape of a tortured woman".
Patti Smith
"Birdland"

In Peter Reich's work, the birds are just as evil as Hitchcock's raging crows, since they are nothing but a deceptive mirage. In the mind of the little boy who Peter Reich still is at the time mentioned in A Book of Dreams, the lure of the flight of birds that he took for his father's spaceship leaves him stunned, and cruelly hurt. He fails to join his father -the only thing in the world that mattered to him, and that represented his reason for living. One can measure this deception’s devastating effect on the young boy’s psyche, the bitterness and disorientation that ensue. Some traumas deep and deleterious enough for Peter Reich to feel the need, several years later, to exorcise them with A Book of Dreams.

In Patti Smith’s saga, the quest undertaken by the little boy for his father has a different outcome, totally mystical, if not appeased and happy. Thus, "Peeps" (Peter's nickname given by Wilhelm Reich to his son) manages to join his daddy in his flying saucer by becoming himself an alien : a very different tonight extraterrestrial and clearly not human being, whom the American singer-poet’s composition tales.

My point being Patti Smith's own Birdland, I deliberately opted for the outcome imagined by her. I preferred the sublimation of the dream and some form of surrealism to a return to the dull, cruel and deceptive reality described by Peter Reich.

Then, at the level of some other connections that I discovered and which inspired this series of paintings for Birdland, I was surprised to note that Peter Reich’s orphan status (who lost his father Wilhelm Reich in 1957, at the age of thirteen), related completely to that of Mitch Brenner in The Birds, also orphan of Franck Brenner : in The Birds, Franck Brenner exists as a nebulous and deified patriarch’s stature, a sort of "Lare Familiaris" protector of the home, as much dead as he is fully worshiped, almighty and unchallenged.