Do Souls Multiply?

Rosalia Martinez/Shuar woman (after Luzuy)

Every twentieth or thirtieth painting or so I feel like I'm painting someone I know other than the one who is actually being painted. It happened in this painting while working on the portrait of Rosalia Martinez; all the way down the start of the process I felt like I was painting someone who once was a student in a drawing class of mine. The Shuar woman on the right does not feel like anyone I know but last year, when painting another Shuar woman, also photographed by Philippe Luzuy and published in Visages de Bronze, she continued to have the spirit of the neighbor of a friend. This then leads me to a novel conclusion that there are about 400 thousand different souls in the world. It is also a novel explanation for a mystery that I have been wondering about: If reincarnation is real, how is it possible then that there are so many more people alive today then there were, say, a thousand years ago. In other words: Do souls multiply?

All kidding aside; Rosalia Martinez wrote the commentary on the CD Les voix du monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales for a recording by Philippe Luzuy called "ujaj", a track that was listed in a top 100 numerous times. As it was before, I had to be inventive to find appropriate images. Last year I ended up painting Jean Rouch together with that Shuar woman who looked like the neighbor. Jean Rouch, as it turned out, had harassed women and would have faced consequences today in the years since the me-too movement. Philippe Luzuy had extensively worked for Jean Rouch. An option I had this year was to paint Paul Morand, who wrote the introduction to Visages de Bronze, but I quickly realized that Morand had even a worse civil record than Rouch did. Paul Morand was a Nazi collaborator during the second world war. I never have been able to find a photo of Luzuy himself yet.