BAMBI WAS A BOY

Why speak of traps? There are none of them here; no snares, no false appearances, no formal betrayals, and no hunter tracing the vector from the long barrel of the rifle that he carries outwards to the body and the heart of his most gentle prey. 

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The first thing to know about me is that you cannot put your hands on me, cannot catch or hold me, or stop me in any way. You might say my body is like smoke, or like a dream or a hologram — you can see me perfectly clearly, but if you reach out to touch you will find nothing but air.

Of course this or that rough or uncouth hand might get lucky now and then. It is impossible I think to be absolutely discreet in these things. But even if I am occasionally delayed this way it will only be for a few minutes — perhaps an hour at most — and then you will lose me again. And this is not so bad. There is no cruelty or cleverness in this dispersal; there are no exceptions, and no reason why anyone in particular ought to feel singled out. 

I say it again: there is no cruelty here. 

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There is the body, which is illuminated in harsh spot lighting, and there is the space around it, which is lost in shadows. A brutal chiaroscuro, employed here like a scalpel to cut the subject from its ground. 

You take such joy in the complicated arrangements of the frame, your eye, the dark ground and the subtlety of the body before it. Normally you would say that the oversaturated subject was the more real and vivid, and that the opaque darkness behind was merely its substrate, the dream or the chaos or the negation, that forms its vital grounding.

But here I think that the postures are reversed. It is exactly by its vivid brilliance that the body slips away; it doesn’t quite vanish, but in any case it is no longer accessible, maybe no longer even present. 

And this means that even though the body is clearly visible it is also absent, and it means that what is still present, and was always present, in the wake of this complicated game of transparencies is the black obscurity of the ground, which is formless, disgorging monsters. 

Produced for the occasion of Mourning Never Comes, an exhibition of new paintings presented by Gallery BARGUM, Berlin.