Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit is a further development of my hand cycle. A model carrying an intense rage within, a gallery planning an exhibition. Rage stores itself in the body, in the jaw, in tensions that wait there.

As art historical references have run through my work for years, I turned three portraits, Caravaggio, Van Dyck, Delacroix, frontal, opened their mouths, not as a formal decision but as a physical necessity. The hands pushed forward, the distortion as statement. The dead flesh I brought to the foreground, embedded in hard chiaroscuro, wrapped in the suggested turquoise of garbage bags.

The early Baroque was the moment the gesture stopped being ideal and was caught by the weight of flesh, the tattoos translate this ornament into the present. The Romantics picked that up again, a time of resistance, reinvention, but also of looking back. I compare the current quality of time with that. And the dead flesh of animals, this word order matters, is a blind spot, a raw nerve of our society.

What shows itself is not a single state, it is a spectrum. The pose gives way and what is essential becomes visible. The asymmetries remain, the proximity is calculated so that the observer has no way out, like someone seized by rage, when the feeling takes over.

Because this rage, that goes through marrow and bone, that sits in the flesh and goes into the flesh, it penetrates, demanded a form. This one.