In 2002 i cycled from Chartres via Le Puy-en-Velay to the border at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and from there by foot along the Camino de Santiago. i saw many strange things: old churches abandoned, old men and women praying before old wooden worm-riddled statues, and worst, at Lourdes, the street leading to the grotto lined with stalls selling plastic bottles shaped like the virgin Mary  to be filled with water from the grotto. For me it had something obscene in it. So the idea or impulse was born; to make a religious work in our modern times, and it should echo my own life journey, from an adolescent attitude as a New Zealand youth towards Catholic girls( they were all "Hot") to a doubt or even ridicule of the cult of the virgin and the immaculate conception, to an Anthroposophic world view of Mary.  So  i needed to be "purified" from all these dubious aspects of my past if i was to really enter into an understanding of Mary and the conception of Jesus. So to cut a long story short you have here an Illustration  of that process of self discovery: of adolescence, ridicule and a degree of sovereignty on the part of the "virgin"- she is attacked but remains unperturbed. That is what i would wish Christians to understand: It is their vision of the virgin Mary  that they see being scandalized, not the virgin Mary herself!. I am Ramses, (returned from) the fire of Purgatory man. he seeks contact but the virgin looks past him. The new Madonna that i sought to make is  in the journey i undertook; the interaction between the two, the self questioning, the seeking out. I quite like it that Ramses looks a little like a ski jumper; how appropriate for my Austrian audience! And the church and the FPÖ saw, with the silicon jacket, a condom?! - well!, only a fervent Catholic  or even perhaps a self-flagellating Protestant, would use such a hole ridden condom! - and the epoxy that runs over and down her face like icing sugar, is supposed to be, said various outraged parties, the result of ejaculation?!. Well, my task was to play out my adolescent thoughts in artistic form in order to reach something  perhaps quite noble so I cannot deny that it is not  provocative; perhaps like one would throw an egg at a politician!, but i have never even in my wildest youth ejaculated so plentifully!  i would need the balls of a prize bull for that amount! So there you have it: people will read into it what ever they want to, but an artist is in the business of pointing to things obliquely with humor and fantasy. The rest of the show was ignored but came to be very important to me.