Eyeful, Mouthful, Peaceful
07/07/22-07/08/22
Fenton Arts Trust Award at A.P.T. Gallery
London
Eyeful
What is this great unrest that exists within a man, I rip you up like a Benihana. Bury me in my cloak, diagonally on a lay line, dust me off, wear me out. I see all these things from all over the place, I inhabit the gaps and wealds from here to Cincinnati where a girl in an ice cream parlour waits for me. Pictures and stories slice me up into slippery little pieces for the jackals to scoff and giggle on.
Turn my head and catch a profile down here in the basement, I’m lit by a screen as I, friendless, wait for my lover to bring home the bacon. Familiar with so many practices, I scroll through interiors, paintings, antiques and bargains for things to fill these halls, a mirror for every centimetre, a soap for every dish, in the creaking halls of the plantation we’re short on time and yet here I am, filling myself with pictures of flowers, dogs, food and faces. Like I said, in the gallerist’s echoless chambers there ain’t no time and yet……pictures, stroke them to wave them on, stroke them to wave them on.
Mouthful
The restaurant was dimly lit, lampshades golden and pleated, their light catching the expressions, mirrors and tablecloths that made up Le Clerc de Folie Chat. The paintings and posters that filled the walls were in the usual style. Art nouveau classics of the good French life, trips to markets, breasts and baguettes, dancing girls with absinthe green eyes their red hair cascading down their corsets. These more illustrative images of a foody life well lived were bordered by golden age photographs that ran the rim of the restaurant. Porcelain women on silky covers, men with hair slicked, sucking perfect cigarettes and smiling sharply at the heavy black lens. Rotund gourmands enter confidently beneath them, bellies sloshing out of their dark suits, their colourful dainty ties flopping helplessly across their curvature, as the small jockey like waiters unburden them from their long hefty, dark coats.
Menu’s now pop open in flashes of white like parachutes revealing the delicate plates that rest inside them. Canard Fumet on a bed roasted vowels, Pigs Trotter A Croix, Lentils Du Pays, Grenadine of Veal, delicate and hefty plates embroidered by the cold masculine hands in the room beyond. Hands that drape and lace breast in jus and sauce, to be sucked imminently from fingers and forks. The blood from steaks floods down throats like melted butter, deep down the shafts and gutters to fill the patrons mausoleum bellies. Around the plates edge juices and jus congeal, ready to be mopped by bread squeezed between podgy little fingers. Once more the silver knives and plunging forks sparkle in the low candle light, and pierce silently into the meat before it is bitten at and swallowed, such a hefty chorus of gulps from these lovers.
Now the turn of the sweet, pert tarts and meringues that have been lurking illuminated in the darkness like the faces of a dancers. Rolling cornicing paved endlessly in glorious little stacks, sweet pretty little bosoms puffed up to collapse and crumble under the weight of a cold, heavy spoon, adamant little luxuries to tell us we’re alive!!!
Peaceful
Morning rings with birds and sounds of the farm and everyone carrying. Pales filled with milk, knives and axes, bales, bridles, plates and shovels. Buckets filled with water that sloshes and fills the troughs that cattle gulp at greedily, their thick muscular necks writhing and pulsing, dragging the water down in the morning heat.
In the neighbouring field six horses come a cantering in the boys direction, who heavily throws down bales for each of them. They bustle and compete with ears pinned back, arguing for the greatest portion. The boy stays for a while to watch them, their long jaws turning, a mechanism of veins, muscles and bones grinding upon the feed. Their veins course across their large heads, as they go on feeding. As they do flies swarm and settle like pearlescent mercenaries, sipping at the marble basin of the pony’s eyes, all are feeding in the morning heat.
The day continues much like this until evening falls and the boy holds a small idol in the candlelight, his father kisses his soft head and their sandals are smooth on the cool stone that lines the villa. They kiss the idol goodnight and look out across the blue fields and the trees and the moon. The sea is peaceful and laps the dinky boats that nestle in the water, as the moon flickers on its surface like diamonds. In the dark interior the table is laid with dull glass and silver. The family pass the food. Tired from the day they fill themselves with strips of lamb, fig and bread. They fill their clay cups with clear crystal water shimmers as it falls. Full of food, the family retire to their beds. They sleep together beneath coarse linen sheets in the silence that holds them and all the world together.
