Leah Gudmundson: Pascale, in your paintings and in your costume design, color seems to play a large role in making meaning. Do you use color as a symbolic signifier? Does the way you deal with color change with the medium?

Pascale Montadon Jodorowsky: Yes, color is very important, and when I talk about color I mean all colors, even black and white… because for me color at first is light. It has a deep meaning, but I choose them completely intuitively. Color comes to me like in a dream… Actually I learned a lot about myself working with Alejandro on our drawings. In my personal work I used to use almost only black and white with some grey.… I wanted to explore the most I was able to do with very few things. I didn’t want any seduction, just the essentials. When I started to work with Alejandro, because of the style of his drawings, other colors came to me naturally… and then I started to use these colors in my own personal work. Now I want to explore where the colors take me.

LG: Can you tell me a bit more about PascALEjandro—the project you did where Alejandro draws skeleton images, and you fill them in? How does collaborating differ from working alone? Is it limited to the illustrations or does it transgress that project? 

PMJ: PascALEjandro is the creation of a third mind, a third spirit, a third artist, a third being who is our symbolic child. Our collaboration is possible because we share love, trust and respect for each other and because our own individuality is strong enough to give everything and never lose anything. We constantly receive from each other. Alejandro is the man I love, he is also the artist I admire the most. He is totally honest and extremely generous.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: I’ve turned into a mirror of Pascale’s words. I have nothing to add to, nor take away from what she says. I am the “ALE” to the “Pasc”.

Image of Alejandro Jodorowsky by Katerina Jebb

LG: Both you and Alejandro use art as a means to ascend to ‘the sacred’ in a spiritual and mystic sense. Do you feel you both have the same idea as to what ‘the sacred’ is?

PMJ: That’s true, for me real art has to take us to the sacred—to the mysterious, invisible and the indecipherable… Alejandro is a very great artist but also a spiritual master himself… He is the most pure spirit I know. I humbly look in the same direction as him. 

AJ: Sacred is what it is, just as it is. Sacred is that which doesn’t appear to be what it is not. A sacred artist, much like a barman-priest, creates a cocktail with equal parts Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

LG: How has finding your love changed you?

PMJ: This is a sublime realization, a constant feeling of peace and happiness. Before we met, we both believed in true love and we just waited to find it, each of us in our own way… until we found each other, without absolutely any doubt and with total certitude.

AJ: Love extracted me from I, and threw me at the You. It made me dissolve into a We, and I found myself in communion with the miraculous energy which sustains the Universe. 

LG: Alejandro, alchemy and anarchy are constant themes in your work. How do they translate into your everyday life?

AJ: Alchemy is the materialization of the spirit, as it is also the spiritualization of matter, which is to say, the unification of that which the mind tells us to see as separated. We believe ourselves to be an island separate from reality, an individual self joined to reality by narrow and fragile bridges. We have rulers and cages and false gods, which are walls of prejudice. Locked within this prejudice our minds become negative, black, rotten. Alchemy allows us to transform this vulgar matter into gold, that is to say into pure consciousness. Anarchy persuades this pure consciousness to tear down the walls of prejudice and achieve the liberty that consists in BEING YOURSELF AND NOT WHAT OTHERS WANT YOU TO BE. 

LG: Do you both actively use psychomagic? What has your most powerful experience been? 

PMJ: I am extremely privileged because I live with Alejandro, so I see him searching, working, studying and finding each day another way of knowledge. This is fascinating, and of course I learn a lot from all that. Living with him is my most powerful experience.

AJ: Psychomagic is simply the liberation of the conscious through extreme mindfulness in order to figure out that everything, absolutely everything, is a continuous miracle. Realizing that the exterior and the interior don’t exist separately, that they are both a single thing. When you reach this level of consciousness, your intellect learns to accept what it is without struggling to turn itself into what it is not; your heart learns to join itself with everything; your sex learns to continuously create; and your body learns to be grateful for being alive. 

LG: A bodhisattva is said to be one who stays in the earthly realm to try and help others to reach enlightenment. Do you feel there are bodhisattvas among us today? 

PMJ: I see Alejandro everyday helping people with total discretion and modesty, I see him everyday sending to more than a million people messages of wisdom and philosophy by Twitter, I see him doing art to heal, so I can testify he is a bodhisattva… but he is more than anything else completely himself: Alejandro Jodorowsky, a being completely free and unique, a total mystic who doesn’t belong to any religion. 

AJ: What I give, I give to myself. What I do not give, I take away from myself. I do not want anything for myself which is meant for others. I am no bodhisattva, I am what I am, without any label. Any human being can have sublime feelings.